So What? Applying the Data-Driven Customer Journey

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

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In this week’s episode of So What? we discuss what actions to take with your data analysis, as well as the Data-driven customer journey.

Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• What is the data-driven customer journey in 2024
• How to apply the data-driven customer journey to your own data
• What actions to take to with your analysis

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD

 

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generative Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:35
Well, hey, Howdy everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to SWOT the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m Katie joined by Chris and John. Hey, guys. Hello. This week, we are talking about applying the data driven customer journey, we’ll cover what is the data driven customer journey in 2024. How to apply the data driven customer journey to your own data and what actions to take with your analysis. This is a conversation that came about from our own reporting. So like a lot of companies and teams, we have just sort of fallen into the routine of creating the same report and not really taking a step back to think through, is this still the right report for us? Is this still data that we can take action with? So I was saying to Chris, that I wasn’t sure that the data driven customer journey analysis that we currently run for Trust Insights was the most useful to me. And he said, Well, what do you want? And I said, that’s an excellent question. And so we decided to turn it into a live stream. So you will be seeing us figure it out live. But I feel like it’s a really good exercise, because I’m not the only person who uses this data. You know, John uses it for further down the funnel, Chris uses it probably for more of the awareness, because that’s a lot of the content he’s creating. And I’m trying to look at it as a whole. And I think that we can all agree that the digital customer journey report that we create for ourselves, we’ve been doing it the same way for pretty much the entire time that Trust Insights has existed, you know, the underlying technology may have changed, but the output itself is still the same. So I feel like we’re due for a refresh. So why not now?

Christopher Penn 2:25
Why not now? So for folks who are unfamiliar, this is the customer journey, right? seven phases, awareness. Does anyone know they exist? Right? What’s the problem that people do people know that even though they have a problem? Consideration is okay, well, what should I be thinking about to solve this problem? Evaluations? Who can do this for me? Or how do I do it myself? purchase or conversion? Of course, like I’ve made a choice. Ownership is okay, what’s my experience, like, now that I’ve, I’ve bought, the thing is my problem solved. Loyalty is I am so impressed with the what I’ve gotten out of this purchase, or whatever that I’m happy to. I’m happy with alien, go buy more of, of whatever it is. And of course, evangelism is the ultimate expression of that saying, like, yeah, I am so thrilled with this, I’m going to tell my friends that this is an awesome product or service or company, and try and get other people to get involved with this as well.

Katie Robbert 3:26
And you’ll notice that it’s broken down into two sections. So one is the buyers journey, and one is the owners journey, because once someone purchases something there, now, they have ownership of the thing. And so the goal with the owners journey is to keep them in. The goal with the buyers journey is to move them through the three phases to purchase. You know, and I know John and I often talk about our sales funnel, when we try to map the stages of our sales funnel to the customer journey. So awareness, consideration, evaluation, purchase, and then at least loyalty. So we don’t have it as deep as this customer journey is, but we definitely have the phases mapped to our funnel so that we kind of know, like, what stage of the funnel is working the best and working the least. Exactly.

Christopher Penn 4:15
So the question we have now that we want to try to figure out is, what do you need to know Katie? And as as befits the name of the show? So what what does that data mean? What are we going to do with that data?

Katie Robbert 4:30
Yeah, no, I mean, and it’s, it’s a great place to start. And so the place that we always start is with the five P’s the purpose people process, platform and performance. And with that, creating user stories. And so I was thinking about this the other day. And the problem that we have right now is my user story. And so, I use a story as Chris has on the screen is a three part sentence as a role. That’s your persona. I need to that’s your task, your action so that that’s your outcome. My user story has been as the CEO, I need to know what channels are performing, so that I know where we should be spending, you know, our time and resources. And I realized, as I was thinking about that, that’s not really the question I’m trying to answer. The question I’m really trying to answer is, which channels are converting, not performing, but converting to specific, you know, event conversions, so that I know, you know that we need to do more of it or adjust our strategy for those. And so it’s similar in nature, but it’s actually answering a different question. Because if we say, emails performing, we know our email channel is performing. That’s great. Okay, we’ll do more email, but it doesn’t tell me enough detail. So that I know, what pieces of our email are actually performing. And what are they doing? Are they driving awareness? Or are they driving conversions, and I’m missing that level of detail. Because I want to be able to make sure that we’re putting the right content on the right channels at the right time.

Christopher Penn 6:12
Okay, so as the as, as the knee jerk practitioner, who just wants the manager office case. I’m gonna go into Google Analytics, I’m gonna go into the advertising section here, choose conversion paths. Now, the one that we care about a lot is like, contact us, right? People, we want people to contact us, I’m going to uncheck everything else except contact us, I’m going to change our look back window, let’s go, let’s go back a few months that we get, like at least at least one quarters worth of data, maybe one quarter and change. And today is 15. So we’ll hit the 14. So one of the things that’s interesting about Google Analytics, the GA four version is that they actually have a funnel, sort of a buyers journey. Map, which is what you’re seeing here and conversion paths. Now, this is not the full customer journey. This is only essentially awareness, consideration and evaluation, and then conversion, whatever the online conversion is, it is not the rest of the journey, we don’t see anything else besides that. So for the contact us form, this is what we see, for the Trust Insights website. We see at the top of that awareness stage, organic search, which no surprise, right, that’s it makes logical sense. You have email referral, organic, social, organic search, referral, email, organic social for the middle of the funnel, your consideration phase, and then direct organic email referral, organic social for the contact us for the last five months. So from a perspective of what’s converting for the contact form, it is organic search is essentially the the driver to focus on here.

Katie Robbert 8:00
Which is interesting, because that’s not what the digital customer journey report previously had been telling us. That report had been saying, email is your best channel, you got to go with email. And in this particular analysis, email is in there. But it’s not the strongest, most effective channel for the specific conversion that I’m looking for.

Christopher Penn 8:23
Exactly. Now, if we switch conversions, and we switch to something like people filling out, like our webinar pages and stuff like that.

Katie Robbert 8:33
Now imagine email make sense?

Christopher Penn 8:35
It’s all email all time. Right? So for people to advance in a nurturing, which is what you know, Jonathan tries to do a lot of, yeah, John should be sending email all day, every day to keep people moving down the funnel towards engaging more with us.

John Wall 8:52
That is my life email all day, every day. I think that pretty much sums it up.

Christopher Penn 8:55
I need a shirt.

Katie Robbert 8:59
But it’s interesting because John and I have different priorities. So for John, getting people to fill out like a webinar form or download a paper or something that falls into our any Thank you conversion, is 100% his priority, because that’s where he starts to figure out who’s paying attention to us, whereas I’m more concerned about who’s raising their hand and saying, I need to buy something or you I need help right now. And obviously, the Contact Us is much farther down the funnel, so there’s gonna be less of them. But that tells me a very different story than what John’s getting in terms of what his priorities are.

Christopher Penn 9:39
Right. So now you have an answer, essentially, for that contact form. Organic search and then it makes sense direct would be if people are aware of us up by that point late in the funnel. Yeah, they they, they will probably come back to us by name, so there wouldn’t be a lot of other channels there.

Katie Robbert 9:58
I would imagine if scroll down on this report. So right now it’s primary channel, channel group, I could switch that to be source medium and get more granular data, which is something that I would be interested in knowing.

Christopher Penn 10:12
Exactly, you can actually do that here. And so find my channel grouping, you can do your, your default. So it’s Google. Interesting. That’s Twitter’s link shortener. Up front there, there’s me, there’s the almost half of the newsletter, there’s the almost half of the newsletter separate version. There is a URL shortener, there’s marketing over coffee in the middle there. And this is for the contact form, there’s Google, almost having the newsletter, me, etc, and so on and so forth. So from a source perspective, this definitely shows a bit more detail.

Katie Robbert 10:45
And I feel like that’s what I’ve been missing in our previous customer journey reports is, you know, I, I look at this, and I still, and I think this is still a little too much information. I really, and I know that this is going to come out wrong, given everything we know about the way that we do attribution, but in some ways, I really only care about the last touch, which isn’t the only thing contributing to people filling out the form, I’m fully aware of that. But at the same time, there’s so many different ways that people use our assets that I have to focus really in on the majority of how people are getting to us, you know, between Google search, and then our email newsletter, or Google search, and then your email newsletter, like I can’t, I’m only one person, I can’t focus on every single version of the path that people are taking, I guess, is my point.

Christopher Penn 11:46
Yeah, and you can see the percentages how much of each stage of the the customer journey each section fulfills. So if you were to focus on last touch, that’s still 50, that’s 55% of the credit in this customer journey. And so that’s not an unreasonable thing to say like, Okay, if we have limited resources limited time, then let’s make sure that we’re making the most of the part where people are the most active, right? A long term strategy be like, Okay, can we get this to be a little bit more balanced to have more interaction early and mid, but for now, if I was in your shoes, I would be saying, Okay, we need to focus on our Google Search Optimization specifically for Google. And we need to to get this Christopher Penn guy to put us in his newsletter more.

Katie Robbert 12:32
Yeah, he’s a slacker, though. So I’m not going to hold my breath for that. Well, what’s interesting is that, you know, again, sort of in our historical, digital customer journey reports, we were over indexing on your assets, Chris. But when we break it down, in this sense, your assets are driving awareness, which is great, which means we need to rethink the messaging in your newsletter to make sure that it is the introductory awareness, drive to Trust Insights, but then the, you know, the journey from your assets to our assets is clear, so that we pick up where you leave off.

Christopher Penn 13:11
Yep. So I guess we probably shouldn’t do that whole pokimane issue.

Katie Robbert 13:17
I know nothing about Pokemons. So I would be very unhelpful in that sense.

Unknown Speaker 13:24
You’re lucky? Yeah.

Katie Robbert 13:25
All right, John, you can handle that one.

Christopher Penn 13:29
And the other question that is worth asking, is it again, going back to your conversion events, when you have the different new conversion events that are set up in your GA four are the the right ones? Because if you if you just say all of them, which a lot of people do just sort of by default, right? Yeah, you get a very different look. Or if you say, I want to look at a very specific act set of activities, that may not be reflected here. And there’s some things there are some gaps as well here, like for example, webinar registration for the webinar we just did is not in here, because we can’t put our GA for tracking code on our webinar landing page right now. I think we have to go in and fix that for the next webinar. But right now, it’s not in here. So those that’d be an another type of conversion that’s not here.

Katie Robbert 14:13
Do we have our course completion as an event? And is it in here?

Christopher Penn 14:21
I think we do.

Katie Robbert 14:25
Because that’s a very clear, but to your point, you know, we should be auditing our events more regularly, because our courses which you can find at trust insights.ai/academy. Those are, how we educate. And I want to know, where people are coming from that they’ve decided, Yes, I’m ready to sign up for a course. And so that way we can do more of that. Like that’s the kind of data that I feel like as You know, the stand in CMO? Because I feel like we kind of share that responsibility. But from my perspective, I feel like we’re missing that level of data.

Christopher Penn 15:08
I agree.

Katie Robbert 15:12
John, what are your thoughts? What kind of data do you if you said, like, if I just had this, I could do something more effective?

John Wall 15:19
Yeah, one of the challenges, because every time that I have to dig in, I usually start backwards with from Hubspot, you know, because I want to go with the conversions. A lot of times when I’ve gone through the Google Data, there’s just too many gaps as far as figuring out who’s who, especially when we do something that’s an enterprise sale, where there’s seven or eight people from a single company that are, you know, hitting stuff. Hubspot does a great job of bundling them up and keeping them under a single reporting structure. So that works well. Yeah, I don’t know. And we have a bunch of challenges, too, because we have, you know, there’s a wide array of products, you know, I mean, courses are easy, and that’s why this is great here. But then so much of what we do is custom consulting or other projects that, you know, it’s not like we can just put up a billboard in San Francisco and be done with it for the month, but it’s a lot more hands on and a lot more discussion.

Katie Robbert 16:12
Well, and so you mentioned you bring up a good point. So a lot of teams are looking to their CRM for their customer journey data. And so you know, as you mentioned, we use Hubspot, and we have our Google Analytics data theoretically integrated into Hubspot. Are you finding that to be enough? Does it give you the information you’re looking for to figure out where someone came from? What pages drove them? Like? Does it give enough customer journey information in that system? Or are you trying to blend the two systems together?

John Wall 16:48
Yeah, we tried to blend but you know, the good news, you know, unfortunately, yes, every customer gets a unique product. But the upside to that is there’s a lot of discussions. So we just have that baked into our process. I mean, it’s the classic marketer, you know, the first time we talked to him, I’m always like, how did you hear from us? And you know, and even then it’s still there, like, oh, yeah, well, I went to the webinar on x, but then you dig deeper, and you’re like, well, and they’ve been subscribed to Chris’s newsletter for seven years. And, you know, they went to PodCamp. Back in 1934, when we had to keep going back. But yeah, the good news is we’re able to do a pretty decent job because we have quality discussions. It’s not like we’re some B2C company where we like, have no idea where Billy, you know, bought that last Coca Cola, because it’s one of the 7 billion that were sold.

Katie Robbert 17:38
All right, Chris, you’ve been pretty busy. What are you working on?

Christopher Penn 17:41
So we actually didn’t have the GA for installed in, I think, epic instance. But it turns out, it’s, it was relatively easy to install. So now it is.

John Wall 17:51
How about the thank you page, though, that comes back to our site at the end of that cycle, I thought that because there there was a conversion. But this is good. Now if we have this for Thinkific, we can actually see, show me the course finishers and stuff like that.

Christopher Penn 18:03
It’s going to show all the the engagements and it’s going to push a bunch of new events into GA for which tomorrow, we will have to come back and start assigning those events, and designate which ones are going to be conversion. So even to something that like that was a basic governance thing, you know, as the expression goes, you know, Cobblers, kids have no shoes. So we did that set that up for ourselves. Right?

Katie Robbert 18:27
Well, and I think you bring up a good point, Chris, is that there’s a misunderstanding that systems like Google Analytics and other pieces of software are set it and forget it, like you set it up once and it just runs, you need a constant maintenance plan. And that’s, you know, where I always go back to the five P’s and specifically in this instance, it would be the process. So you know, of the people who setting it up, but also who’s maintaining it? And what is the process for maintaining this particular system? How often are you doing it? Who needs to be involved? What of it needs to be maintained? How do you know that your data quality is good, you know, so we were just casually having a conversation about course, completions. And it brought you down this rabbit hole of Oh, and by the way, now, this thing and so, you know, I say a little bit of shame on us for not doing that planning ahead of time. Because, you know, you’re not going to catch everything. But our process should have included once a quarter, you know, auditing our own system. And it even that gets you further to the finish line than not doing it at all.

Christopher Penn 19:35
Oh yeah, for sure. I think that’s important. And then also, even in the planning process itself. So when we launched our course, back in December, the agenda of AI course, we didn’t actually say let’s put the conversion something gimmick in here.

Katie Robbert 19:55
Which is, you know, and it’s interesting because we did put together a whole course launch process us. And it’s not the first course that we’ve launched, you know, we have our Google Analytics 4 course, we have, as you mentioned, our generative AI course, we also have our Google Search Console course. And somehow that was just overlooked for all of them. It was a rough year. And that’s the thing is, you know, I think that what we’re showing is like it happens, but then you have to go back and do the work and correct it.

Christopher Penn 20:25
Exactly, exactly. So that’s, that is now what so that’s now installed. The downside is we can’t run the attribution data on what’s already happened, because nothing’s ever retroactive.

Katie Robbert 20:38
And that is, you know, and so as we think about, like, our goals for the company for 2024. That’s disappointing to me, I’m disappointed in myself for not asking you about it sooner, because that’s the kind of data when we talk about the digital customer journey. And what we need to make decisions on that is the exact data that I’ve been looking for not realizing that it just wasn’t being collected at all.

Christopher Penn 21:02
Yep, yep. We’re all fired. Get out!

Katie Robbert 21:05
Well all right! Trust Insights is no more by everyone.

John Wall 21:09
Start fresh tomorrow

Christopher Penn 21:11
there we go. Exactly. Well, let’s say today is the best day to start with any of this stuff. Okay, so all that set up now. Now what?

Katie Robbert 21:22
Well, and that’s, you know, when we look, do you have an example of our old digital customer journey report. And when I say old, I mean, literally, like last month, you know, last couple of months. Because I want to give everyone a little bit of context as to what we’re talking about, if you’ve never seen our digital customer journey, report. This is something we do for ourselves. It’s something we do for our clients. If you’re interested, we can also do it for you at trust insights.ai/contact. And you can talk with the illustrious John Wall about the options.

Christopher Penn 22:01
This is newsletter subscription for December 23. And we’re though.

Katie Robbert 22:09
And so in this report, the challenge is, you know, it’s interesting, because it’s not dissimilar to the data we were just looking at in Google Analytics. But the data represented like this, I look at it. And I just kind of sit there go, I’m not sure what I need to do with this. Because I feel like there’s just not enough context. So this says almost timely, which is your personal newsletter, Chris is the number one driver of newsletter subscriptions to the Trust Insights newsletter, followed by Google organic, and so on, so forth. And so, you know, I can look at that and go, Okay, well, what about almost timely newsletter? is driving newsletter subscriptions, you know, does that hold water? And how can we connect the two a little bit more to make it a more seamless transition for people? And I just don’t know the answers to those questions. Because what this doesn’t tell me is, are there particular issues, other particular topics? And so I feel like the challenge with this, especially a company like ours, where we have a lot of different content assets, is that it doesn’t tell me in specifics, what’s working, it tells me in broad strokes.

Christopher Penn 23:23
And that’s where in these canned reports, you’re not going to get as much detail as you’re going to get by slicing and dicing all the stuff within the explorations. So the explorations are really where this has to happen, because that’s where the data is going to live. So let’s go ahead and start an exploration here. So we want to know, you want to know what conversions by so here’s, here’s, here’s how I campaign. Yeah, exactly by campaign. So let’s again, let’s go back to say October through February, get a nice long window here, we’re going to look at source medium. And we’re going to do session source medium, because we care about where the traffic came from within a session. We want to check in because this is marketing stuff, we want to use sessions as our metric. We also want to have events available conversions available. Okay, and let’s let’s let’s start with that. Let’s drag in session source medium as our rows. And let’s look at convert conversions. But we want to we forgot event name. Let’s bring in a conversion event while we’re at it. We want our event name here. To contain, contact us. Right? Because that’s what we care about. So for this time period, we see Google organic, almost. So now we need to bring in campaign. Yep.

Katie Robbert 25:21
You know, and this is all with the caveat that we are following our own advice and tagging things correctly.

Christopher Penn 25:29
So let’s add in our camp session campaign.

So now we have a bit more grant, let’s add some more rows here. Okay, so we have Google organic, there’s no campaign for for those referrals. There’s 20, for the January 14, showed the newsletter brought in a thank you conversion, the 2014, the February 11, the October 22, and then some inbox insights ones as well.

Katie Robbert 26:03
And so that to me is more useful, because then I can go look at those particular issues and find out what the topic was, what drove people to finally raised their hand and say, Hey, I need some help you guys did the thing. Can you help me also do the thing?

Christopher Penn 26:18
Right, so the 2024, so the January 14, issue, what was in that issue, that issue was just closures to the future of generative AI, doing model comparisons, and then of course, all of our usual stuff. And that one had, there’s always the the promotion for the course, the one link that gets a lot of traffic from the newsletter every week is the content authenticity statements. So this is a link at the top of the newsletter that bounces of the site. And this page gets updated fairly regularly as laws change. But this is one of the most frequently traffic pages on our website.

Katie Robbert 27:03
But that, we don’t know that that is true, then driving conversions to contact us. Right?

Christopher Penn 27:08
So what you’d want to do then, is you want to start bringing in page data. So let’s put in page title and page path and query string, import that kill off session source medium campaign for right now. And let’s just look at page title and see, oh, that’s not helpful. That’s not helpful at all. But that I mean, that’s, that is technically true. There is do this is the challenge GA for? In the old version, you had a previous page, I remember Yeah. And you could pass that count along, you can’t do that here. This is where we build attribution models.

Katie Robbert 27:58
But that’s a really good point. Because we do you know that there’s limitations with Google Analytics 4. And I know that the questions I’m asking are not unreasonable. And it’s the questions that a lot of people are asking, because that’s the kind of data they want to be able to make decisions on. They aren’t able to build these reports in Looker studio very cleanly. We clearly can’t build them in Explorer hub very cleanly. So then what do we do? How do we get that? How do we make really good data driven decisions with our customer journey if we can’t get to the data?

Christopher Penn 28:32
So where you would have to go for this at the person level, in whatever your marketing automation system is, and extract the audit trail data from there, and use that as your attribution data, because then you could see, you know, on the way to conversion, so here’s list of all your prospects that have converted. And then here’s the audit trail of all the pages they visited, and the channels that came in from so you would filter that data down until you were left with here’s how many people had this page in their audit trail somewhere that they went then went on to convert.

Katie Robbert 29:06
And that goes back to that’s the process that it sounds like what John is following, as he’s looking at our CRM data at individual people, and the Google Analytics data that’s included in that. Which, you know, based on our level of subscription to our CRM is difficult for us to pull out. Yes. And that’s I think a lot of people are running into the same is, we were so used to being able to get this data from Google Analytics, Universal Analytics. And now it’s sort of like the new world order of how do I how do I get this? Do I just forget about Google? Can I just not do my data driven customer journey? And I feel like that’s really the core question is, we just can’t do it the way we used to. So what do we do instead?

Christopher Penn 29:58
The way you could get out This, if you have the big query, data backup installed is you can pull the anonymous user ID and look at the pages per session that way. That’s a pain in the ass, though.

Katie Robbert 30:12
And I think that that’s, you know, worth noting is that, you know, people are trying to figure it out, and it’s requiring more technical skill than it used to.

Christopher Penn 30:24
Yeah, let me see if I can do that. I may not be able to do that.

Katie Robbert 30:26
At least me, John, what do you make of all of this?

John Wall 30:31
Yeah, well, this, we’ve talked about this a lot. You know, should clients just be dumping everything to BigQuery. So they have all this data, and you’re not trying to do any of this in GA? It’s, I have not seen anybody that has like been able to have all their questions answered, just going through, you know, the GA interface, right, you have to do additional stuff and find another way to get there really.

Katie Robbert 30:56
And so I feel like this is where the conversation of the single view of the customer then, you know, enters into the narrative. And where people are trying to figure out is the CDP, which is a customer data platform, the right move for me, what does it look like? So we have a client who’s working on putting together a CDP. For that reason, they they’re such a big enterprise sized company, that they’re trying to figure out at a very large scale with a lot of data, what their data driven customer journey looks like, but they have so much data in so many different places, that it feels like an impossible task.

Christopher Penn 31:36
Yeah, so what you can see now on screen is the raw Google Analytics data from GA for stored in BigQuery. And what we’re specifically looking for is this here, which is the use of pseudo ID. That’s a person ID that Google has assigned. So the way to extract information like what you’re after which pages lead to a conversion, would be to write a big query query against this table, asking it to group your traffic by user ID filter for user IDs, where the conversion event name was, in our case, contact us conversion by page visited in chronological order, and if that seems intimidating, you can actually export a small chunk of this data as is and ask a tool like ChatGPT to help you write the BigQuery query that you can then paste into BigQuery and have it run.

Katie Robbert 32:42
And then could you take that information and push it into some sort of a dashboard?

Christopher Penn 32:50
Yes, you connect Big Query to Looker studio. for that. I’m trying to remember though Flickr Studio supports transactions transact SQL statements are not I don’t think it does.

Katie Robbert 33:05
So that kind of puts us back to the beginning, where I can get at the data. But for me to have to go through and read the results of a big query. Query is probably not the best use of my time, because I’m going to have a lot of questions. And then I’m going to be, you know, borrowing your time to say, what does this mean? What’s this? How do I read this? And so it’s, yes, we’re starting to get to the data, but it’s still not really accessible.

Christopher Penn 33:32
Right? And that’s one of the reasons why people don’t really use Google Analytics 4 nearly as much as they did Universal Analytics, because the answers are not, they’re not easy to get out of it. But the data is there, the data exists, it is just not in a form that the average non technical user can get at.

Katie Robbert 33:54
So I guess, the next question is, you know, what do we do about this? So if I were a client, and I came to you and I had all of these questions, what advice would you give to me if I said, I need to be making decisions with my data driven customer journey? Number one, how do I build my customer journey in 2024? And number two, what decisions can I realistically make if not all of them?

Christopher Penn 34:20
So you can’t make that page level? Out of what’s in the box. But what you do have access to is that top level stuff, right, so if we go back, if we go back to where we were in the beginning, which is let’s uncheck all this stuff, and pay attention to the Contact Us forms and look at the last, you know, 90 days or so. Here we go like this. What we arrive at REL in a relatively fast because he does Google organic search, and we do this because we look to the source medium, Google organic search and my newsletter the two Do drivers of the conversions you care about? So there’s so what is how do you? How do you do more with that information? So one of the things that I would start with it, that’s real simple is go into a way to put Search Console, go into Google Search Console. Right? So for the same period of time, what pages are getting traffic? Right? So let’s go to search results. Let’s go from October one. It’s a custom date for your time. Do October one. Apply? Look at pages. We have sort by clicks. So these are the pages that are getting traffic from search. Now, the question to ask yourself here is there are some there pages that are getting clicks, but those they’re getting a huge number of impressions? And then you got to wonder, well, why aren’t we getting more clicks out of those pages? Like if you if you look it up on a percentage basis, some of these pages are going to give us a lot of traffic? So I’m going to run into this not a whole lot.

Katie Robbert 36:04
Yeah, and I feel like now we’re getting, you know, much deeper into the analysis. So you have Search Console data, you could also then go back into Google Analytics, find these same sets of pages, get the session data for those pages and try to fit try to make a more complete story of what’s going on. Yep.

Christopher Penn 36:27
But even just this, I would say, Okay, let’s take that thing. Let’s take the I have to unzip it. Thanks, Google. What’s downloads? Open up the file? We have our chart now. Which should be our largest pages? Yeah. Okay, let’s see. Let’s talk about SEO today. I have some Google Search Console. Data here about the top performing pages on my website, in this document, are columns, for clicks columns, for impressions, plus the page URL, what I’m looking to do is improve the amount of search traffic i get from Google to pages on my site. pages that get a lot of impressions are pages that Google thinks are relevant for a given search term, pages that get a lot of clicks are pages, the user agrees are a good fit for their search. What I think we should do is look at click through rate. And find pages that get a lot of impressions, but not a lot of clicks. And prioritize them by impressions for a shortlist of pages that we should try to tune up to better fit user intent. What questions do you have? So that’s our query that sounds like a solid strategy for improving your website’s search traffic.

Katie Robbert 38:47
Way to go feel like that UBT is very supportive.

Christopher Penn 38:52
It is, it is not mansplaining Well.

Katie Robbert 38:56
As a man do you ever feel mansplained?

Christopher Penn 39:00
Absolutely, it’s awkward. It’s like I know this you don’t have to tell me this. Do we have any goals any particular aspects of style tags meta descriptions or content update what is in this that it thinks that it can do that?

Katie Robbert 39:18
But, but I like the train of thought that you’re going down and I know that we did this with a client the other day we actually pulled a screenshot of a particular page, put it in here and asked her recommendations on what we should be doing so I would imagine once we get our short list of pages that need to be improved. We could also then use this system for very tactical recommendations on what about those pages should be improved. John, I hope you’re taking notes I’m going to make you replicate this exactly.

John Wall 39:51
I’m just screenshotting this right here.

Katie Robbert 39:55
You know, but for those who are watching and listening, you know, the thing that It strikes me is that it’s not just generative AI that’s changing the way that we need to be doing things, all around all of the systems that we’re using, like Google Analytics, 4, like our CRM data, all of that is changing. And so we really need to be thinking, what should I be doing differently? Because the way we’ve been doing it just may not be working anymore.

Christopher Penn 40:24
Yep. So it’s thinking about, it’s like, one of the things that I would do with this is, let’s go ahead and take. So this is arranged by clicks, we’ve got AI copyright law, you’ve got old 2019. Post here, we’ve got a bunch of our updates and things. So one of the things if this comes up, let’s actually let’s see what it comes up with. So what understanding YouTube analytics, three clicks, some 1000 impressions, position position at three, that page that that’s not great. Okay, so let’s take a look. We’ll actually let me see this page.

Okay, so this is our page in question that is not great that it says opportunity.

Katie Robbert 41:25
Is it? So that’s understanding YouTube analytics, and the other page that you’re on is algorithm? But I mean, regardless, for the sake of the example.

Christopher Penn 41:33
Let’s find out a second here. This is 7184. I think that’s not the page title. So that the data for that is, I look at the actual file, it is the tools for Competitive Intelligence page. So it hallucinated the page name, but it got the URL Correct? Hmm. So the metrics, right, so this is the page in question that it thinks is not great. So okay, so let’s look at this page, and see what we can do to improve it for so that’s that page is competitive intelligence for the concept and topic of competitive intelligence. Here’s the raw page copy. So we’re gonna go to that page. I’m Scott lugar hit all slick all copy. Based on this page copy, and the term and focus of competitive intelligence, what is not on this page that should be for a page focused on competitive intelligence, in the context, tools for competitive intelligence are several key areas that could be added definition importance, the process, tool categories, the page mentions tools, but while of course, it’s a transcriptions, tool examples and descriptions.

Katie Robbert 43:23
Your examples, your point is well taken, Chris, because you stopped and said, Of course, it’s a transcript. And one of the pieces of advice that we give is, if you put your transcript up, it’s a good proxy for content. But what this is telling me is, our transcript is great. But then we need to pull out even more information and supplement it with more detail that’s really going to make that page shine.

Christopher Penn 43:49
Yep, exactly. So I would, I would say with this, we have an outline, essentially, because that’s what this thing built was an outline. And so I would take the transcript, feed it to a language ball and say, Okay, I want you to take this initial data of this transcript, and I want you to reorganize the transcript to adhere to this outline so that we’re still keeping our words and our content, right. So from a copyright perspectives, that makes it a derivative work. So we still own our data, but it would, it would slot this in into it into our categories that would make this page probably perform better.

Katie Robbert 44:24
But then we would still have to write more, because we don’t have necessarily tool examples and case studies and so on so forth. You know, so we could reorder the transcript, but we would still need to add additional detail to it. And that’s not what we want generative AI to do for us, right?

Christopher Penn 44:46
Maybe at the very least, what we could do is have it pull together the pieces of the page that do fill in, you know, the specific categories where there are stuff and then highlight where there is and stuff and then we could record add more content or make future shows. Right, that could then be patched into this.

Katie Robbert 45:05
Gotcha. That makes sense. And so, you know, we’ve spent the past 45 minutes, trying to figure out how to get to basically a single decision. And so it it’s useful, it’s detailed, but at the same time, it still feels very overwhelming to try to get this page by page by page by page. You know, so I can look at a high level and see what’s performing what’s driving conversions, I can go into Search Console and figure out what pages at that time, they may not be the pages that were driving conversions, but they’re in the cluster of them, you know, and so I, my next step is I have to decide what’s the most important thing to do? Because there’s a lot of things. There’s no shortage of things to do. But I have to figure out what is the most important thing, and that’s really the daunting decision that’s on my shoulders now.

Christopher Penn 45:59
Exactly. Yeah. Well, so that, though, I think is an excellent sort of conclusion on the use of both the data driven customer journey, and the use of generative AI, the tools can do a lot of the work, like we did a lot of data processing in a relatively short amount of time. human judgment is still needed to so like your you still have a job, right? You’re still employable.

Katie Robbert 46:27
Back in business.

Christopher Penn 46:30
Because the machine can’t do it all. I mean, it could, but it wouldn’t be optimal, because it doesn’t have the full context that it needs to understand why it’s making decisions making we can give very tactical things to do like, hey, rewrite this transcript reorder this transcripts to fit these parameters. But it doesn’t replace using Yeah, that’s an important page. Because it, it can you know, if you look in, in our spreadsheet, there are stuff like this one here that are old press release page from overuse words for 2019. From a mathematical perspective, that’s the fifth most important page on our site from a are we do we have products and services as Trust Insights to sell for this? No, right? Exactly. Your judgment will be no, let’s not focus on that page. Because even though mathematically, it’s important. It’s conceptually not.

Katie Robbert 47:20
Well, and we saw in that very quick example, that generative AI hallucinated the title of the page. And so you still need that human judgment to make sure that the data it’s giving you back is actually correct.

Christopher Penn 47:33
Yes, exactly. So those are the that’s, that’s, that’s the value that you still provide as human being is going. Okay. I’m going to tell you whether or not that’s actually a priority.

Katie Robbert 47:46
John, what are you going to do with all this?

John Wall 47:49
Well, yeah, even when you get to the bottom of the barrel of it, it’s still the question of like, Okay, does that mean, we need to do more of this, or we need to do something else, you know, you never know at what stage of growth you’re at with any of those campaigns. So it, you know, you kind of take all the data in front of you, and then pick your best shot. I mean, that’s it, it doesn’t really matter. You know, and then it’s funny, because sometimes you find out later on that oh, yeah, actually, that data was all screwed up. But at least we did something that’s really all you can do.

Christopher Penn 48:16
Yeah, in John’s case, for example, with marketing over coffee, I look at the interviews on pages on the site that get the highest amount of traffic for those interviews. And if there’s not a transcript there, the bare minimum is get a transcript on that page. And then use generative AI to create a summary that’s more appealing, that maybe covers the highlights that supplements the show notes because the show notes are just a short bullet point list, but then they don’t contain the content of the show. So for those super high performing pages, like what we just did, I would repeat that exercise with generative AI.

Katie Robbert 48:46
Makes sense?

Christopher Penn 48:52
Always more to do. Yeah. All right, folks, that’s gonna do it for this week. So I guess we will see you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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