 I firmly believe in how I run my business and how I work with my clients is before you spend a dollar on advertising, no matter what that advertising is, you should have some kind of measurement plan in place. We can't always be perfect. We can't always measure everything we're going to do. We can't always know exactly how far every dollar is going to go or whatever dollar brought to us. We might be limited by resources or technology or who knows, but having some kind of plan in place to say, can we at least take an educated guess to figure out whether our marketing is doing something for us is, I think, it's not just crucial. I think it's non-negotiable in this day and age. So with that in mind, that's how I'm going to approach this whole first part. This whole first presentation is all about how to better measure the things that are important in terms of your web presence. I won't spend too much time on this slide. As I said, I have been working in agencies and things for about 10 years. That took a year off to go live overseas, so that was a little break. But after that, I've been pretty much just doing this. I've been focusing on the digital analytics and ad side of things more heavily since 2014 or so. As I mentioned before I got started, my focus is really on performance marketing. I definitely do work with client on the awareness and engagement side of things, which absolutely has its place in any kind of broader marketing strategy, for sure. But what really gets me up and going in the morning is doing things that we can measure and try to be consistently improving. On a personal note, I spend a lot of my time and, unfortunately, a lot of my money on playing pinball, collecting pinball. I'd love to have one in the room here with me, but my accountant says I'm not allowed to expense a pinball machine to the business. So until I can convince him to let me do that, we're stuck with the boring background. And also, I'm not a medical professional. That's going to make sense in just a second. So to start things off, I want to ask you all kind of a rhetorical question, which is, and that actually makes me think I've got the chat open now, is ask yourself a question, which is, how would you improve your website's performance? That question can have a lot of different answers. That could be things like, it could be have a technology answer. Is our website fast? Is it slow? Does it have all the information people need? Things like that. So there's a lot of different ways to think about that. But how I want to frame that in terms of the conversation today is, how is your website contributing to your success as an organization? And then the following question to that is, how would you improve that? So keep that in the back of your minds as I continue talking. And really what that leads into is, if you're not measuring something, so in this case, we're talking about your website, if you're not measuring things on your website, then there's no problems. It's like, we don't know how our website contributes to the success of our organization, then it must be successful, right? Because we can't prove ourselves wrong. I don't think anybody necessarily gets up in the morning and thinks about it in that way. But it would probably surprise you how often I'm chatting with a client or a prospect or something. And they say, we don't really know, but we assume this. And I'm like, well, how do you assume that? And point I want to make with this whole thing is, sometimes the answers we're going to get might be uncomfortable when we start to measure things. But it's very important that we measure them anyway. Ignore the Texas's takeaways. But I'd like to ask our first poll question right now, if I could. And the question is, how confident are you in the measurement on your website? So I would encourage everyone to perhaps reply into the chat and I'll do a tally there. Sure. Yeah. This doesn't have to be scientific. So I would say think about this kind of on a sliding scale. Are you not confident? Are you somewhat confident? Are you really confident? I'll give everyone a couple of seconds to answer. All right. A couple more seconds to everyone and get an answer. And I'd like to see everyone put in something here. All right. So the consensus is definitely somewhat, people are somewhat confident, which is that's good to hear for sure. And we had one where I don't even, I don't know what you mean, which is also I think a perfectly valid answer because I didn't explain really what I meant. And I think that in and of itself leans into why something like this is really important and what I want to, what I want everyone to get out of this full talk, it'll come together in the end. You'll see. So the consensus was from most people with somewhat, but I am sensing a lot of people are really unsure. They're like, what's he gonna tell me right now that's gonna make me a lot less confident. I wanted somebody to be like, I'm really confident. I know, I know for sure. But the whole, my analogy that I'll make through this whole kind of presentation is let's compare kind of your website as it relates to your business or your organization very much like your own health. So even if you feel really healthy, even if the things in the organization are going well, you're having a last year had a great year or maybe your fiscal year end is coming up this year and you're feeling really good about your, your goals in terms of both the stated goals of the organization, but also things like we're raising money, the way we want to do our funding is secure, whatever the kind of things that keep you and stakeholders up at night, even if you feel really good about those things, sometimes checkups are really important. So I want you to put yourself in the mental plate. We're going to, we're all going to take a trip to the doctor's office together, except we're not going to be looking at our blood pressure and we're not checking our eyes and ears. We're going to be looking at our websites and we're going to be asking ourselves potentially difficult questions about what we know or what we don't know about what's going on. So whenever you go to the doctor and whether you have a complaint or not, before the doctor makes a diagnosis, they're going to perform what people will call clinical discovery. And that, that kind of, that can mean different things, but I'm going to have to find that. So first is they're going to make a visual exam. They're going to take a look with their eyes and different tools of your physical condition. And they're going to make ask questions about that. And they're going to make certain determinations based on that. Then they're going to ask investigative questions. So they're going to probe you on certain things. How are you feeling? That's an investigative question. What happens when you do this or when you wake up in the morning, are you in pain, things like that? So we're going to do the same. And then another thing they're going to do is they're going to ask you about your current medications. What are you doing already to alleviate the any symptoms you may be feeling? Or maybe you're taking a medication for, for like things like high cholesterol or blood pressure or something that's, you don't necessarily feel bad if you don't take it, but it's a good idea. It's preventative. And we're going to do the same thing with that third part, the current medication, that's going to be next week. So I'll get to that. That's really going to be on the ad side. We're going to focus on the first two things. So we're going to take a look visually and we're going to also ask them investigative questions. So onto the visual exams, the visual exam. My first question to you, which is one you should be asking yourself is, what tools slash assets are you using today to measure, to measure the performance of your website and applying directly to the person who said, I don't understand the question. What I mean specifically is, can you answer some basic questions about your website? If I was asking, if I asked you things like how many people visit your website on a monthly basis, on average, how many people visited your website last, what channels drive people to your website? Is it mostly through Google organic searches? Is it through paid advertisements? Is it through social media, either free or paid? Is it referrals from maybe government websites or partner websites or sponsor websites or anything like that? How do people get there? The people who come to your website, do they come on a mobile phone or device or do they come? Do they visit on a desktop computer, like a desktop or a lab? Where physically do the people who come to your website come from? What country? What state? What city? These are all things that you can answer and then it goes into more things from there. But I want you to think about what tools and assets you're using today. Feel free to take your own notes on that. If you don't know the answer to that question, that's perfectly valid and valuable. One of the things I want to do today is I want to ask questions that make you feel a little bit uncomfortable because you're like, I don't know the answer to that question. That's part of my goal today. So the next part is if you made that mental list of things that you have in place currently to met the performance or effectiveness of your website, are those tools set up and functioning? And what I mean by this, this might sound like an obvious question, but a lot of times in organizations, whether in the public sector, the private sector, nonprofits, charities, whatever, we spend money on and we do this in our day to day lives with things like exercise equipment. We bought the treadmill, but the treadmill doesn't work unless we actually get on the treadmill and run on it. You know what I mean? Those tools that you have, if they're free and they're not using them, that's not so bad. I suppose there's maybe an opportunity cost there, but you're not at least losing any money. But there are lots of paid tools out there to measure your website or measure your marketing. If you're paying for something and not using it, or if it's maybe not set up correctly, that's something you want to be aware of as well. So that might be another question added to the list. And then this one's a tougher one. Ask yourself, are there key pieces missing? Are there blind spots? And obviously, because this is not a one-on-one discussion and I can't dig into answers that you're giving, but when you think about your website, how it contributes to your organization's goals, whatever those goals may be, or whether it's maybe even just maybe a specific goal, are there key pieces of information you'd like to know, but you don't, either you don't know how or you're just not sure? And that could be something like, I'll give you an example that might be applied to some of you and might not apply to others. There maybe would be nonprofits, for example, that solicit donations on their website. And perhaps you already know how many donations come in via the website, that would be a great start. But then I would ask you something like, how many different donations were there that added up to that figure? Or where do those people come from that donate that money? And by where? Maybe they're local, maybe it's a local charity or a local nonprofit, or it could be, what I'm really getting to, I think is, is it, did you send out an email to your donor list and then they came and donated money? Or did you put, were you interviewed on television or on the radio or on the newspaper or were you on a podcast, things like that? So it's, there are questions that I want you to think about of, maybe I know a little bit, I know how many people came to my website last year. What I don't know is, I don't know what pages on my website are useful, as in what, what pages do people consume the content on and read and what others, maybe I need to look at the content again, or I need to look at how that functions, because maybe it's not doing what it needs to be doing. Here are some examples of some of the types of measurement that can happen on a website that a lot of people in my experience aren't doing, because they either don't know they can or they don't know how to implement that. So some examples of that would be thing tracking downloads. Do you have PDFs or another one that would be pretty common? I think in your world would be something like forms, like sign up forms for things, or maybe you help folks out with, with legal advice and things like that, and you've got an application to or a form that helps people go to the tenancy board to file a complaint or something like that. Resources that you can download on the website, this can be things like PDFs or videos or any number of different things. Did you know you could track the, when someone downloads that, how that person got there, all those questions, you can track that, think of it like a funnel, that can be done. Things like, if you have a pop up or a form on your website, so this is where you're asking people to input some information, usually first name, last name, email, that kind of thing. Did you know that you can track, not only when people see those things, but when they fill them out, for example? So there's lots of things we don't want to know about that. If you've got video on your website, embedded video, either from YouTube or Vimeo or you're toasted on your own website, do you know if people actually watch those videos? We can find that out. So it's, if you have that kind of content and you just assume what the video performs for us gangbusters, of course it's working well, but I would ask you, for example, well, do you really know? Do you have the numbers to back that up? That's a question maybe worth asking. Another one that's, I would say relatively new, or it's certainly a lot easier than it used to be is something called scroll depth. So let's say you've got a page on your website that has a lot of information on it, and so users will often have to scroll down the page to consume all the information, or there's maybe different information for different people at different depths of the page. If you think about that page in terms of percentages, the top being zero and the bottom being 100, do you know how far down most people scroll on that page? Or for example, the question could be, do people scroll down, basically consuming more or less of that content on that page, depending on where they come from? That's something that would be interesting. Forum fellows I've already mentioned, but this one's a really big one for anybody who's trying to do things like grow a newsletter database, or a donor database, or they are trying to generate, this is more so in the private sector, but I think for some of you might be applicable, things like form fills. If you have a form on your website that says get in touch with us, something very simple, know how that form fill happens in the first place is very important to deciding if that's something you wanted to generate more of, well, we're going to need to know what advertising, if anything, brought them there, or whether it was organic or exactly how that plays out. CTA interaction would be, CTA stands for call to action. This is a pretty broad statement, but a call to action is basically a, it's usually a button looks what these look like, it usually has rounded corners, it's usually a very bright color and call to action do exactly what the name would suggest, which is they're calling the user to take some action. So good examples of these would be a button that says learn more, a button that says buy now, a button that says add to cart, a button that says get a demo, a button that says contact us, whatever. Those buttons can be a really key integral part of any flow on a website. And so measuring whether those buttons are effective for you or not in terms of I want to get people to take action X, well, to do that, you're going to have a CTA that tells them what they need to do. And then you need to find out if people are clicking on that. And then another one that a lot of people often want to know about is what we call form abandonment, which is, let's say you've got a sign up form on your website, could be for an event, it could be for a webinar, it could be for, it could be as simple as a contact form, get in touch with us, here's some information we need to know about you before we can get back to you. So maybe your form has five, six fields as name and has address as phone number, it has a comment field, maybe somebody gets partway through the form and then they just go, this is too much, or I don't know the answer to this or whatever, and they abandon the form and they leave. That's something sometimes that you can track as well. So sometimes that's good to know because let's say you've got a multi step process and the last step is filling in that form. So maybe they clicked an ad, they came to the website, we got that down, they clicked a CTA, we got that down. And then the drop off at each step tells us what we need to improve. So let's say people come to the website via and then maybe something like 75% click the CTA. Okay, that's pretty good. I'd say we could maybe improve that, but 75% would be amazing. They get to your form and then only 1% fill in the form. Okay, that's a huge drop off point. We would want to ask questions to ourselves about, okay, there's lots of different reasons why that might be, but knowing those drop off points at each stage can help us actually make decisions to improve things or make things better. So what are some key tools and how we can do this? Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to list a whole lot. And nor do I want to inundate people with a lot of different things because I think how I've set this kind of talk up is this is meant to be really introductory or it's meant to just start a conversation or start a thought process on your end. So I'll keep this really simple, but some key tools to do a lot of the things that I just talked about these a few of these you probably have already heard of. Some of you may already know or use all three. The top one would be Google Analytics. This is the kind of gold standard for web analytics has been for a really long time. It's free. It's provided by Google to you at no charge. All you need to do is basically either yourself or get a web developer or somebody like that to help you set this up on your website. If you don't already have it. And what this does is it lets us track all kinds of information out of the box with no setup. It lets us track all kinds of information about the people who come to your website. It's great to have just basic data, of course, and we can answer all kinds of the questions that I just said with just Google Analytics. But if you want to take that a little further, another thing that I often use with my clients is a tool called Google Tag Manager. I won't get too much into what Google Tag Manager is, but Google Tag Manager is basically it's the best way to think of it is it's a container that exists on the back end of your website that holds other bits of code and trackers and tools in it. So basically what this means is let's say you're going through a site redesign or you've got a web developer on contract or something like that. And you say, Hey, can you install Google Tag Manager for me? And they put that on there. And then when the future when the future is maybe you are working with someone like myself or another marketer or you hire an agency or it could be anything somebody at your organization comes in with some they want to add a new tool like a tool that adds heat maps to your website. For example, instead of having to add a piece of code right onto the back end of your website, which would probably require a web developer, or you could go without it and hope that you don't break your website. Google Tag Manager allows you to very easily put code, very simple code on the website to do all kinds of things like add all those bells and whistles. The other thing that Google Tag Manager does that's really valuable for someone like me, if you'd have the knowledge to be able to do it is you can do what I like to call advanced measurement tracking or advanced conversion tracking. I'll talk a little bit more about that. But some of the things I talked about on this slide, a lot of these things are things that Google Analytics doesn't really do very well or doesn't do very clearly or doesn't do very accurately read out of the box. But with Google Tag Manager on top of it, you can do all of these things relatively easily. And then once it's set up, it just starts collecting data and then you can just look back on that data anytime. And the third one would be a CRM. Again, I would assume that probably most of you are using some form of CRM. CRM stands for customer relationship management or customer resource management, different things. But basically a CRM, what it really does for you at the end of the day is it allows you to, it's basically like a fancy Rolodex or anybody who doesn't know, but it's a way to let us manage the relationships we have with maybe they're not our customers. It may not apply to us directly, but it lets us manage the relationship that we have with donors or stakeholders or even potentially our clients. There's a lot of things that are different between CRMs, but some common ones would be like HubSpot would be a big one in the really big world. I think this probably doesn't apply to any of us, but things like Salesforce or Marketo or Pardot or things like that. Those probably don't apply too much to us, but others that are CRMs or they have CRM functionality would be like MailChimp has a great basic CRM that's good for either small businesses or maybe nonprofits that don't have big budgets to spend on things like that. And there's lots and lots of other tools out there. But basically what this does is it lets us keep information about contacts. And then we can also tie a lot of that data back to our website. So I'll give you an example of what that can do for you or the power of that. Let's say you have the HubSpot free CRM and that there's a lot of features that HubSpot just offers you for free. You have that connected to your website. So when someone submits a contact form on your website and you've got that set up with HubSpot, let's say I go in and I fill in your form, you'll get a notification or an email or something that says, Matt Whalen filled in your contact form and here's all the information you put in. All that information goes into the HubSpot CRM. So you now have a captured bit of information about me. You have my name, all the things I've given you. You have my name, my email address, you have my comments that were put in there. You have the date of when that happened, you got how I got there, the form I filled out, all of that information gets captured. And now from now on, throughout the rest of our relationship, you have record keeping available to you that can basically tell the entire story of our relationship, no matter what that is. It also allows you to do things to, again, depending on the CRM, but it allows you to do things like send mass emails and things like that, things you might want to do. So this can be useful in a lot of different ways. I tried to keep that broad, but if you use your imagination, you can probably think about how that might apply to you. So I'll talk about some common issues that I come across that I want to put it out there in terms of things that you might want to think about. So a common issue would be, obviously, no measurement. So if we've gotten this far in the presentation and you're saying to yourself, geez, I really don't know anything of what he's talked about so far. I'm really not sure if we do this at all. So hopefully there is some kind of measurement being tracked. Google Analytics, I would say would be the bare minimum. Hopefully you've got that on your nonprofits website. If not, don't worry. It's a relatively easy fix. You can reach out to a bunch of different people to get that fixed, but it's at least knowing that you aren't measuring it. That would be a problem. The second one would be only basic data being tracked. So again, think back to a few slides ago with this. We'll call this a little bit more advanced. So a common issue that I run into is I'm chatting with a prospect or I have a new client and I'm working with them and they say, yeah, I've got Google Analytics on my website, no problem. And I go, oh, great. And I take a look at their Google Analytics instance and it turns out that, yep, it's installed, which is great. But they would like to know things like form fields and how those happen, or maybe they have an e-commerce store and they want to know, like, where are sales coming from? Things like that. And none of that's being tracked. So this would be the second most common issue. I think I often will run into clients who their website was built by a contractor or an agency or something like that. And a lot of those professionals will put Google Analytics on when they build the website. And then maybe it was done five, six, eight years ago, but no one's checked on it and no one's done any work. So there's some data there, but we're missing a lot of data that can answer key questions. Now, I want to ask one more question. We don't have a ton of time. I do want to leave time for questions. But my last question to you would be, do you know if you're tracking more than basic data? And this can just be a yes or no. And then a couple more seconds for more people to answer that. But yeah, think about what you know about your own website and whether you can, whether you're getting some of this more advanced data. And I'm not sharing my screen anymore, but I will. Okay, great. I will. So it was a little bit split, but for sure, I'm actually pleased to see that there was some more advanced data being tracked. That's really great to see. Although I did definitely see some folks a little over half, at least if they answered weren't tracking basic data. If that's you don't feel bad, that's absolutely very common, especially I have worked with a nonprofit clients in the past. And it's oftentimes it's just a matter of resourcing. We've got other things to focus on. We need to, we've got government relations. We've got donors. We've got our stakeholders. We've got clients. We've got all kinds of things going on. We don't have time to worry about this web stuff. And I hear you 100%. That's why I think for a lot of organizations, it's very important to reach out to people who do this type of thing, to try to get some of this measurement set up. Because the nice thing about this type of stuff is once it is set up, as long as you're not making major changes to the website, it's like a foundation on a house. Once it's there, it's holding up the house forever. So we can look back on this data once it's been set up, and we can always make decisions based on it. But working with somebody is definitely something that helps a lot with that. So these are, again, really open-ended. We don't have a ton of time to talk about a bunch, but I do want to leave you with these investigative questions here. Ask yourself, be honest with yourself about whether or whether somebody in your organization knows the answer to this question. And if you don't, I would say it might be a topic of discussion at your next, whatever, your next all hands or your marketing meeting or whatever. Say, do we really know the answers to these questions? And if not, how can we find out? So how do your clients slash donors find your website? That'd be a common one. Are you satisfied with how many leads slash donations your website generated last quarter? And instead of leads and donations, if that doesn't apply to you, because I know not everything applies to everybody, it's, if there's an action that people can take on your website, what's the reason for your website to exist? Every website has some kind of reason to exist. Mine, for example, is pretty simple. My website is nothing really pretty to look at. It's basically just to prove, hey, I'm a real person and I am who I say I am. And there's also a little contact form at the bottom. So the purpose of my website is to social proof, but it's also to generate leads for myself. So whatever your website is supposed to do, I guess this question's almost in two parts. A, how many leads slash donations your website generated last quarter? And B, are you satisfied with that number? And then lastly is how does your website contribute to your organization's overall goals? This actually ties in a lot of what I was just talking about with the last one. And because everybody's obviously going to be different, it's what is the one way to think of it is what's the mission statement of your organization? And then how does your website contribute to that? And what I'll say is if you say I don't know how it does or oh, it really doesn't, it's just we have it just for this other reason or something, I would say, I would challenge you a little bit on that to say, could it be doing, could it be doing more? I guess that's the second part of this is how does your website contribute to organization's goals? And then B would be how can you make that better? How can you make it more impactful? Oftentimes in my work, I work with clients, whether in the private sector or in government or nonprofits that say, oh, we're different because everything's just relationship based. And generally in my experience, the relationships are obviously important in business and nonprofit and everything. But your website means more than you think it is. And I think you're doing a disservice to yourself by saying, oh, the website doesn't really matter. We don't really need to focus any attention on it. So this is just a little hint of next week. I want to get great to questions just in case anybody has some. But next week, one of the things we're going to be talking about, it's the next step in the diagnostic process, which is asking all of those questions. One of the key things is how do people get to your website? That's obviously a key. If no one can get to your website, then it doesn't really have much of a purpose or it doesn't have, it doesn't impact, it doesn't impact things at all. And so what we'll be talking about a process that I use to help you decide when you're paying for people to come to your website. We're not going to talk about organic SEO, but we will talk about paid. And we're going to talk about these four steps a lot next week, which is measuring what we can, tracking our spending, cutting down on waste, and doubling down on our success. That's a little hint of things that are to come. And then my last kind of thought before we move on to questions that I want to leave you with is of all of the things that I talked about today, is there a particular thing that made you a little nervous or uncomfortable? Like I said, that was one of my stated goals. And I don't do it in a malicious way. I do it because I think it's really important for us to look inward and examine our own kind of approaches to things and saying, okay, you said that thing about tracking form fills and not knowing where those are coming from. And it's like, yeah, that applies to me. And have a, have a think about that. If there's something that makes you nervous, then I think what that really means is it, then it's time to either figure out, okay, what are we going to do about that? Or you can absolutely find somebody to reach out to and say, raise your hand and say, hey, I need a professional's help with this because I'd really like to get those answers. Or I'd like to not feel so nervous about that. I'm going to have a drink of water here. And if you've got questions, put them in the chat. I saw one question come through. And so I'll tackle that one first. And then we will answer any remaining questions. Fabulous. Thank you so much, Matt. Super grateful. And yeah, to everyone who's here, join us again next week, we're going to go a little bit deeper this time with a bit of an ad focus, please registered for the next event. Tell your friends it'll be super fun. Otherwise we can pepper you with questions. Matt, if you want to start with the first one you saw with chat, and then you can take it. Yeah, great. So the one that I saw is how can I tell if Google analytics is installed on my website, which is a really great question. And there are a couple different ways. I would say if you're, if you're feeling savvy enough, you can absolutely look at the source code of your website. If you know how to do that, and you can look for the Google analytics code snippet there. If you're not feeling like you're advanced enough to do that, Google has a browser extension and also just a web tool called the Google tag assistant. And what that does is it will scan your any website, but you go on your website and it will scan it and look for things like Google analytics codes or Google tag manager codes, things like that. So you can do that. One of the other ways would be depending on how your, the content management system you're using, let's say it's WordPress or maybe it's Wix or maybe it's Squarespace. All of those individual content management systems, let's say you use Squarespace just for sake of argument. If you Google Squarespace, Google analytics, you'll find a help article from Squarespace that says, how do I add Google analytics to my website? And you'll see in the Squarespace menu system where that lives. So you can then go check that out. So no matter how your website is built, just Google that and you can figure out if it's installed that way. And then I think the last one, this one's kind of the least chance of success on your first go is you can find out if you've got a Google analytics account yourself just by going to analytics.google.com in your web browser. The reason why I say this is a relatively low chance of success is unless you have been at your nonprofit since ages gone by and you were there when the website was made and you set this up and you've been a team of maybe one or two, it's not super likely that you're the account that has that set up. So that may or may not be successful for you. If you're not sure, I would try one of the other ways first. I think probably the Google's Ag Assistance, probably the easiest way that anybody can check and see if they have that. And if that, yeah, that sounds really helpful actually. And I know about that tool. I dropped the link into the chat. Oh, thank you. Because I think we're all, many of us cursed with especially the small to medium nonprofits where we had an intern five years ago build a website and they've gone on to the other things in their lives. And now there are many mysteries we have. A story I have heard so many times and it never gets old. Yeah, that's like one point I was going to make too, is let's say you have Google analytics. That's one part of the process, but the next part, and this happens all the time is I'll be working with somebody and exactly the story you just said, Oh, we had an intern set that up and they're not here anymore. And we don't have access to that account anymore. That's really common happens all the time. There are lots of different approaches to do at that point. So I won't answer it specifically here, but making sure that you have access to the Google analytics account that's associated with your website is really important. So even if you have Google analytics, I would say don't rest on that. See if you can get into the actual Google analytics account or someone in your team can get into it because just because it's recording data, if you can actually access the data, well, it's not very useful, then is it? So that's a good thing to check because a lot of organizations lose access to different accounts over time as people transition in and out of the organization. Yeah, so I've got a question here from someone who's on the more sophisticated side of things from Aaron who asks, what is the difference between Google analytics for and universal analytics? And what do these flavors should I be using as I work on building it? I wasn't creating my sites. That's an excellent question. And I knew someone was going to ask that. So the answer is you should use both. That's the short answer. So for anyone that doesn't know what that question means is universal analytics is the current recommended, what called a version of Google analytics. There was an older one before that called Google analytics classic or classic Google analytics. I can't remember anymore. That was phased out when I first started working in the industry. So mid 2010s, that started to be phased out. Universal analytics has been the standard analytics version. Since then, Google has launched a new version of analysts called GA4, Google Analytics 4. It's the fourth version. They've launched that in the last few years. It's not technically a beta product. They don't call it that, but I would consider it still a little bit of a beta project. It's not going to change drastically, but it is a big departure from universal analytics in terms of how it measures data, how it displays data, how data gets sliced and diced. But basically what Google recommends and what I recommend to clients, you should just use both. You can still use and I still pay attention most to Google analytics or universal analytics. For now, the reason is because it still works with a lot more things. GA4 doesn't yet work with everything. For example, I'll use the Squarespace example again. Some CMSs don't even allow you to put Google Analytics 4 on natively. You have to edit the code to be able to put it on. I apologize if Squarespace lets you do it. I'm not meaning to slam them or just using them as an example, but there are apps and things that integrate with Google Analytics with the older version, universal analytics, but they don't integrate with the new version. So it's a bit too bleeding edge right now. I think to recommend saying, nope, we can switch over to GA4, but I mean, what's likely going to happen in the next five years? Hard to predict. I don't want to make a prediction because I know this is being recorded, but in the next few years, what's going to happen is Google is going to move everybody over to Google Analytics 4. It's what they've done before and that's what they'll do again. So getting ahead of that by just having both of those measurement platforms running in the background and collecting data is a good way to approach it. Right. So in most cases, in less work in a more restricted content management system, you can use both as the safe answer. You can always use both even in, even with a more restricted CMS, although it's just, it's going to be a bit more complicated in a more restricted CMS, but there's also solutions around that. Like most good CMS is the ones I named, for example, all that you install Google Tag Manager on them and you can run both universal analytics and GA4 within Google Tag Manager. So that's the way around it. Tag Manager is magic. I've got another question coming in from someone who basically has had the experience we all have, which is looking at the data sometimes can be demoralizing. In this case, the practitioner is saying, I thought that's a really high bounce rate and this alarms. Do you have any recommendations for how you would start to tackle and run some tests to say, how can I improve that bounce rate? Sure. And also maybe remind some of us what a bounce rate is. You read my mind. So bounce rate for anybody that's, that doesn't know or has forgotten bounce rate is, is a measurement of someone who comes to either a page or your website in general. And then they, the kind of, the way that most people would say is they come and they leave without doing anything. That's not really true because if let's say your website was one page, which you're like, you're laughing yourself right now and you're like, who's got a website that's one page? My website is one page for example. There are lots of websites that are one page in this day and age. It's just, it only needs to serve one purpose so I can put everything on one page. So let's say, let's use my website for an example. If you go on my website and you read all my content and you are, maybe you're already talking to me. We had a call, an intro call or something like that. And you're wondering if you want to hire me and then you navigate away. You close your browser, you go to Netflix, whatever. You would technically count in most cases as a bounce. But my kind of challenge to you would be, wasn't that, didn't you do exactly what I wanted you to do? You consumed all my content and maybe I hopefully changed your mind or convinced you that, yeah, you should work with me. So I'll say this, I'll back up a little bit. The question is how can we reduce bounce rate or when we measure bounce rate, how can we make changes to, to, to reduce that? I'll say that I have a somewhat controversial opinion about bounce rate. And that is that I don't care about bounce rate. So I tell people that and it's, I get shocked responses. Bounce rate is a measurement, it's a metric that's been around for a really long time. And it was really useful in, in an older version of the web, in my opinion, absolutely. But with all the advanced measurement we have nowadays and all the different ways that a website or a page on a website can be useful to you, bounce rate doesn't really tell you very much. And then people end up focusing too much on bounce rate. They're like, bounce rate went up 15% this month. So obviously this new content we added didn't work. That's not really true. The other thing I'll say about bounce rate is, if I'm working with you on analytics, I'm trying to help you improve your analytics of your website in terms of we want to track more things. We want to analyze that data and make decisions. If I was a bad actor as in, if I had malicious intent, I could easily, very easily juice that bounce rate and get it to go the way I want it. Say, oh, see, since you started working with me, your bounce rates fall into 2% and you're looking at your bounce rate going, this is great 2%, only 2% of people bounce. Yeah. But if we go back to my earlier slide that talks about scroll depth, for example, I could set up scroll depth tracking. So as soon as somebody scrolls 5%, 10%, 1% down a page, that counts as what Google Analytics calls an event. And if it's an interaction event, that counts against bounce rate, meaning that person no longer counts as a bounce. So generally I would say, don't pay too much attention to bounce rate. Instead, I would shift your question more towards, it goes back to that question I asked earlier, which is, what do we want our website to do? And is our website effective at doing that thing? So I know that's not necessarily the answer you were looking for, but I would say, I don't pay too much attention to bounce rate. Yeah, it's really a goals and activity orientation. So you say, what do I want them to do on this page? Cool. So thank you so much, Matt. We have come up against the end of our hour. Of course, you're not done with us because you're going to be back in a week and I'm super grateful for that. That's going to be super helpful. If you want to give me the screen, I will then just take people through a final goodbye. Otherwise, thank you so much everyone for being part of this event. It's a bit of an experiment. We're doing two this month as we go deeper into a topic, but it's not the only events we have planned. So same time, same place next week, we'll go deeper with Matt into paid media best practices. And then as you see, April, May, June, and even beyond that, we've got some whole bunch of interesting events lined up. So continue to take a look at the site and register for those events that look like they are of interest. And finally, I wasn't kidding. And I said, I need your help right now. It's Ben and me and a number of other volunteers. And we are always looking to expand the team. So if you would like to be an event producer, if you want to help take notes and start documenting these events, maybe you want to be one of the chat moderators dropping in key links through the events, please reach out to me. Love to work with you and bring you into the team. Otherwise, thank you so much everyone for coming and being part of the event today. We'll see you next week, where if not, I'll see you in our subsequent months and have a lovely day and enjoy your lunch hour as it comes to an act. Thanks everyone. I'll see you next week. Ciao all.