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Episode Description
In this episode, Lauren chats with analytics expert Philippa Gamse about the importance of website analytics for law firms. Philippa explains website analytics, how they work, and the valuable insights they can provide into your content’s effectiveness, traffic sources, and potential new product opportunities.
The conversation covers critical metrics, the power of search engine traffic vs. social media ads, video engagement tracking, and tips for getting started. For law firms looking to optimize their online presence and revenue, this episode provides an accessible introduction to the vast potential of website analytics.
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Episode Resources
Get Her E-Book: Five Digital Analytics Gems
Episode Transcript
PHILIPPA: [00:00:00] The wonderful thing about content like that is that soon as somebody puts in their credit card, the content is available to them. There’s no, you don’t have to do anything else. You know, you, you’re basically literally making money while you sleep.
LAUREN: Welcome to a different practice. I’m your host, Lauren Lester, and I’m obsessed with all things, business wellbeing, and optimizing the practice of law for solo and small firm lawyers.
I started my solo practice right out of law school, built it from the ground up, and now work part time while earning well over six figures. I’m here to share tangible, concrete tools and resources for ditching the legal profession’s antiquated approach and building a law practice optimized for profit and efficiency.
Think of this as grabbing coffee with your work bestie, mixed with everything they didn’t teach you in law school about running a business. Pull up a seat, grab a cup and get ready to be encouraged and challenged. This is a different practice. Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of a different [00:01:00] practice.
I’m taking a trip down memory lane today a little bit. Got a great episode that is talking all about website analytics. If you don’t know a little bit of my backstory, I was in the web development space for about a decade before switching careers and becoming a lawyer. And when I switched, I thought I was just going to leave all of that information behind all of that experience behind that those skills, would it be something that I would translate or even use in the legal profession?
Boy, was I wrong? I have used them extensively. I think that a lot of my success to this point has been because of all of that experience in the web development space, being able to understand how to get new clients, new qualified leads using the platforms that consumers use, how to meet them where they’re at.
So I’m excited for this conversation today to talk with an industry expert about the data that we can pull from our [00:02:00] websites, from web analytics, to learn more about who is coming to our websites. What are those folks looking for? How can we better serve them to ultimately grow our business? I’m chatting today with Philippa Games.
She has over 25 years of experience in digital marketing strategy and analytics and has consulted with nearly 500 clients and has worked on websites that have cumulatively generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Like us platform owners, Business owners and marketing executives hire Philippa to find hidden insights in their web analytics that will grow their business and cut wasted spending.
She has helped clients in North America, Europe, and the Middle East translate their numbers into transformational ideas that move the business forward, reveal opportunities for new markets, products, and services, and maximizes the return on investment. Filippa is the author of 42 rules for a website that wins, which has been endorsed by Guy Kawasaki, and she has taught at three international business schools.[00:03:00]
I wanted to have this conversation with Filippa today and share it with y’all because this is an important part of the reality of having a business in today’s market. I know that we are traditionally a profession that is slow to change, would like things maybe to stay the way that they were decades ago.
I know I’ve certainly spoken with colleagues who hate social media, I get it, right, don’t really do much with their websites. It can be overwhelming. It’s a pain. A area that requires a lot of expertise to be able to do it well. It feels like something is just another item on our to-do list that’s gonna take a ton of time and we really need to spend time doing all the lawyering.
That’s what a lot of lawyers wanna do, right? They didn’t get into this to run a business. They got into this to be a lawyer. But if you are a law firm owner, you do run a business and we can’t put our head in the sand and take the field of dreams approach of if I build it, they will come. There are so many law firms in the world today.
There are so many [00:04:00] businesses in the world today that are all competing for a lot of the same market. So you have to have a way to reach those people first and then be able to connect with them so that they do want to come. Learn more about your business and engage with your services. That’s not going to happen on its own.
So it’s really important to understand the pieces that go into that marketing strategy that go into that business development doesn’t necessarily mean you need to become an expert in it. I certainly hope that you take from this conversation that this is not something you need to get into the weeds on.
I think it’s important to understand what it means, what it can do for your business and how it can really help you. you, but there are tons of professionals out there, including Filippa, who do this for a living, right? They love being in the weeds of all this stuff. So you don’t have to feel like you do, but to just ignore it entirely, I think is really detrimental to your business.
A web presence, having good search engine ranking, providing all different types of content into including written content, videos, you [00:05:00] know, even podcasts, posting on social media. That is all. part of our norm. Now it is all I would say required to have a business in today’s market. And so we’re going to tackle just one piece of that today when we’re talking about websites in particular, and the analytics or the data that you can pull from the user’s interaction with your site.
She has a great story about how a law firm used that data to create products, which I absolutely loved in this conversation. So you could really get some insights that will help you grow your business in ways that maybe you didn’t expect. I hope you find the conversation helpful and inspiring. Here’s my conversation with Philippa Games.
Well, Philippa, thank you so much for being on a different practice. Welcome.
PHILIPPA: Hi, it’s great to be with you, Lauren.
LAUREN: I’m really excited for the conversation today. You are touching into my former life in the web development space. And really excited to bring this knowledge to our [00:06:00] listeners all about website analytics and why it is so important.
so important, even though it may feel very foreign to a lot of us attorneys. So can you start just by educating us on like the very basics? What are we talking about when somebody says, you know, look at your website analytics or there’s data in there that is important to you as a business? Like what are website analytics?
PHILIPPA: So you probably heard of programs like Google Analytics, and what website analytics does is to collect information about people who visit your website. So basically it tells you how many people come, where they go, what they do, which sounds, I mean, it is simple in concept, but what it can give you is amazing insights into what works and what doesn’t work, what people are looking for.
And, and so that helps you to make your website and your message stronger in terms of attracting your target markets and send and selling. Oh, hopefully well as a law firm, you’re probably just generating leads off of your website. Although [00:07:00] we can talk about that. I actually have a story of how we created some for sale products on a legal website that’s based on the analytics report.
So hopefully we’ll get into that. So. The truth is that if you don’t have analytics, then if you have a website and, you know, even if you don’t think your website brings you any business, you’re still putting time and money into it. And if you don’t have analytics, you have really no idea how that site is performing.
You don’t, you can’t answer any of the questions that I just said. And you’re honestly shooting in the dark with what. with what you’re doing and with that money that you put into it. So there are definitely opportunities online to, to grow your practice and you want to make the most of those. But in order to do that, honestly, analytics should be an integral part of what you’re doing.
LAUREN: For how we collect this data, you mentioned like Google analytics. How would somebody know if this is data they are currently tracking or if they’re not and want to start tracking this data, what are some tools that you would [00:08:00] recommend be implemented?
PHILIPPA: Yeah. There are actually tools that can easily tell me, there are tools that actually can tell you for any website, whether it’s got Google Analytics running.
It’s a little techie, but you know, I, I would say if you have a web developer, I mean, ask them if people want to know how to do it technically you could, it’s just, I don’t necessarily want to talk about it here. Cause I think we’ll bore everybody else. It is. Pretty easy to find out. And it’s also pretty easy to implement because Google Analytics is free.
And so if you have a Google account. You can sign into the analytics part of what Google provides and just sign up for, for Google analytics. Now, again, it takes a little bit of coding to get it onto your site. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, which again, isn’t that complicated? If people who know what they’re doing, if you don’t want to do it, honestly, I would suggest that you get help to do that because, and there are plenty of people out there who do that because.
What you don’t, there are certain default settings [00:09:00] that it has when you put it in, that you want to make sure you adjust to be the optimum for your business. Beyond getting started, you actually want to. Also make sure that the, the implementation of it is optimal for your business. So there’s lots and lots of things that you can tell that you can’t tell from the way it gets set up when you just put it on your site.
There’s a lot more you can do to customize it to exactly what you want to know and what you want to do. And again, honestly, I, it’s not, I’m not saying this to sell myself, but I do think that it’s worth getting some help. Just to, to go through that, to explain to you what it could do for your business specifically, and to get that going.
LAUREN: And I think in terms of like the tech side of websites and coding and development, it is. On the lower end, I think of the skills level, I think for a lot of us attorneys, it may feel very techie, right? And that’s something we want to wade into. But just for any of the listeners who are thinking like, Oh my gosh, this is, you [00:10:00] know, going to be thousands of dollars for somebody to do this for me.
We’re not talking about the level of expertise of like building a website for developers in this space. I think the analytics part is probably an easier part of their day. of their practice and their expertise. So you should be able to find someone who’s a reasonable cost.
PHILIPPA: Well, although I would like to push back on you, Lauren, because this is what I do for a living.
This is my professional experience and, you know, yeah, getting it onto the site and running. Okay. You can, you can get that done pretty simply making really good in depth custom use of it. Is. Takes a little more skill and understanding and experience.
LAUREN: I’m glad that you made that distinction. I, yes, I was thinking more of the implementation piece is pretty straightforward to do.
But yes, to actually understand and review the data and get it customized for what that particular website or website owner needs would definitely be a higher level of skill. Right,
PHILIPPA: right. And certainly, you know [00:11:00] not in the tens of thousands necessarily. So, you know, and, and if you can make the changes to your business that it might suggest or to your content or whatever, you know, it, it may well pay for itself pretty quickly.
LAUREN: Absolutely. And what are some of those things that a law firm, let’s say would want to be looking at? How can that data from website analytics be used to grow the business or increase revenue?
PHILIPPA: Right. So on legal sites, one of the things that as a lawyer, you know, how do you get business right? One of the things you want to do is to establish your expertise.
Like I want to go to a lawyer who knows what they’re doing. And one of the ways to do that is to have really good content on your site that talks about your areas of expertise, you know, provides commentary on what’s going on currently, you know, in the law and the news, etc. Gives helpful advice and, and, and tips to people.
So, for example, you can, you can start really looking in depth at what of the content on your [00:12:00] site people consume. So there’s a few things. One is you can measure what we call scroll depth, which is how far down a page people scroll. So when you, when you set up Google Analytics by default, as I said, it only does certain things.
It will automatically measure when somebody’s gone 90 percent of the way down the page. But if you’ve got a long page, that’s quite a long way. That’s quite a lot of scrolling. And in my experience, you know, people aren’t interested in the content. They’re not going to go very far at all. And so what happens is you have really good content and then your call to action is at the bottom of the page.
And if people aren’t going that down that far, they’re not going to see that call to action. And so one thing that you can do, for example, if you get somebody who can customize your analytics is to set it up so that it flags. I usually ping I don’t know, 10, 90%. So you can start to get a really good idea of like, if you’ve got blog postings and so on, how much of that posting is somebody [00:13:00] really, really reading?
Because then You know, where you need to put your important stuff. Like your, this is the really good stuff. This is the call to action and so on. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with having a call to action in more than one place on the page. You can have multiple calls to action, right? This also applies by the way, to podcasts and videos.
So you might be running a podcast. You might be making people like, really like video content. And of course, if you have video content, you can cross post it to social media and stuff if you want to. I’ve seen, unfortunately, tons of instances where people make really, really good videos and the content in the video is really good.
The problem is that they spend the first 30 seconds of the video saying, hello, our name is blah, blah. And we’ve been in business for thousands of years. And we know all about, and you know, and it’s boring. It’s honestly boring. And. The analytics will tell you that, you know, I’ve seen this. I’ve tried to convince business owners that this is true.
You lose maybe 50 percent of your traffic within the first 15 seconds. And if you [00:14:00] think about it, when you like, if you see a YouTube video, for example, it says X number of views. All that tells you is how many people press the play button. It doesn’t tell you how many of those then checked out within 10 seconds.
So you want to know that because again, when, once you see that kind of data, it really, again, makes that, that point to you. In that the first few seconds of that video, you’ve got to say, okay, we’re going to talk about this and this is why you should listen to the end and all of that kind of stuff. So understanding, you know, I’ve said that your content is really important in order to establish your authority.
So then understanding how people consume your content, which topics they really enjoy, what kinds of presentations, you know, do your particular audience prefer print, you know, print as in blog postings, you know, words. Do they prefer to, to watch video? Do they prefer just to listen to the podcast? You know, you want to know that for your own specific markets and not just sort of go by [00:15:00] industry benchmarks, which I don’t necessarily believe it.
LAUREN: They’re a little bit too broad. You know, even in the legal profession, it’s a pretty big swath of types of lawyers practice area. So yeah, to sort of make a generic assumption can really be detrimental to an individual business.
PHILIPPA: Right, right. And then let me say something else about content and tell you my favorite legal, legal idea story.
So, I mean, I have worked with, with legal clients in the past and one of the things that’s really a goldmine on your website in terms of this Understanding how people use your content is your, your search search engine. So once you have a lot of content on your site, it’s a really good idea to have a search engine on your site.
And again, this is a little more coding, but you know, you should have a developer who can do this. I don’t, I dunno if these days WordPress comes with plugins that will do it automatically and so on. The key is once you’ve got a search engine on your site, you can track what people put into that search engine.[00:16:00]
And that is an absolute goldmine for market research. So this is what people are looking for on your sites, not people in Google, it’s people actually on your website asking you questions. And so that tells you several things. It tells you what people are expecting you to provide in terms of content and what they think you should know about, which is great.
Because if you don’t have any content on a particular topic that is within your area of expertise, you could create it. So it tells you what your markets want. It also tells you what language they use, what words they use to describe what they’re looking for. And especially in areas where there’s a lot of technical jargon.
And I don’t know if some of your audience, you know, are specialized in certain areas where that occurs. Yeah. So, you know, the, the average lay person who might need your services may well not be familiar with those words. And if they aren’t, you can’t optimize your site with those words. You can’t write all your [00:17:00] site in legal language that nobody’s going to understand because, because it won’t work.
People are looking in Google for words that they know, and then they’re coming to your site and looking for words that they know. So what you can do if you want to use legal language, obviously, is to introduce it, but you have to introduce it by first of all, using the words that they do know to get their attention.
So again, you know, this is really good to understand what people who are coming to your site understand of what you’re talking about. So here’s my story. I was once working one of my favorite all time clients actually was an employment lawyer here in, in the Silicon Valley area where I live, but her, her business did not do litigation.
It did employment. So she worked with some of the big Silicon Valley companies in terms of training them to create a fairer workplace. So, you know, avoiding sexual harassment suits and that kind of thing. So she had, as, as I’ve been talking about [00:18:00] absolutely massive amount of content on her site around all sorts of workplace issues, and we started looking at what people were looking for.
And we realized that, you know, so her, her target market, her buyers are, are corporate law, sorry, large corporations, right? A lot of the people looking for content on her website were the employees. So they’re asking questions like here’s what’s going on. Am I being sexually harassed? Do I have a case? Was I just unfairly terminated or whatever it might be.
And those people are obviously never going to hire her to come and present a workshop. But there’s, there were significant numbers of them. And we started to produce eBooks, downloadable content that said, you know, obviously all sorts of legal disclaimers all over them, but that said, for example, so you think you’re being sexually harassed at work.
Many things that people think are harassment are legally not. So, before you go and spend a lot of money on a real lawyer, or no, I shouldn’t say a real [00:19:00] lawyer, I mean you know, an actual in person lawyer that you hire, buy this ebook, which was some sort of impulse price, you know, 15, 20 bucks, something like that, that will give you a a start in figuring out whether or not you might have a case.
And we did one for being accused of harassment. What do I do? We did one, we did like a sexual harassment prevention handbook. We did the same things for, I thought I, I think I’ve been unfairly terminated, or I think I should be getting a overtime pay. And we also did employers manuals as well, because these things could sell all over the country, right?
I mean, again, I know there’s differences in different States, but, but you know, it was written in a fairly general way. And the wonderful thing about content like that is that you, you’ve got your little shopping cart going on, but of course, as soon as somebody puts in their credit card that the content is available to them, there’s no, you don’t have to do anything else.
You know, you, you’re basically literally making money while you sleep and these. eBooks generated several thousand dollars a month, which [00:20:00] obviously more than paid for the website and the consultants. Yeah.
LAUREN: And your services. Yeah.
PHILIPPA: But also, I mean, it was funny. I used to ask her whether she was worried about people sharing this content with each other.
Like one person buys it and then they share it with a bazillion people. And she said, I call that marketing because they’re all seeing my name and my phone’s name. Right.
LAUREN: Absolutely. And she’s been identified as an expert in the field.
PHILIPPA: Right. And it’s no cost to her, no fulfillment, you know, so as far as she’s concerned, it’s, you know, share it with whoever you like.
And again, because this isn’t her core business, right? Her core business is, is is corporate workshops.
LAUREN: Yeah. And that’s what I think I like most about. That story is not only the idea of having a product in legal, which can be more difficult just by the nature of our business. And I’m always searching for some way I can figure out a new product.
But what I really love is it’s indirectly tied. So it’s not that you necessarily have to. Create a new product directly within the [00:21:00] space that you want to practice in or that you want your customer base in. What I love about that story is she just saw from the data that she was getting all of these questions from the employees and thought, well, how can I produce something that would serve them?
But I have no intention of, of actually. Lawyering for those employees, like I’m not offering them lawyering services, but still have found a way to generate some revenue based on it and then in turn grew the part of her practice. She did want to.
PHILIPPA: Right. Right. It was very cool. And and I should say, of course, that, you know, when you say this was her idea, actually, of course it was a joint idea because but that’s one of the things I love about working with clients is that, you know, sometimes I’ll get a prospective clients and they’ll say, what experience do you have in our industry?
And, and, you know, honestly, my answer is it doesn’t really matter. I mean, like, it’s great to have experience to be able to already have a story ready like that. But when I work with the clients, it’s, it’s really a partnership because the, you have to understand your own business to make use of these analytics, because you’ve got to know what [00:22:00] you want to get and who your, who your ideal customers and prospects are.
And the best person to understand that is the business owner or the person in charge of marketing. And I can never know as much about that as they do. Absolutely. And so I always say, you know what, you’re the expert in your industry, I am the expert in applying analytics, and together, you know, the sum of our, our heads is better than the individual, right?
But that’s how this works, you know, and if there’s anything that I need to know about your industry that’s specific, you can explain that to me, right?
LAUREN: So when you’re starting to work with a new client or Say it’s a law firm. Are there certain metrics that are more important or maybe are the first ones to look at to kind of get a initial baseline?
And then obviously, you know, I’m sure this can go in a million different directions and get super granular, but what are the kind of big ones that you see that really can help drive revenue or traffic or whatever the goal that the business owner has? [00:23:00]
PHILIPPA: Yeah. So honestly, I don’t think that there are, I don’t, I don’t believe in giving out a laundry list of you must check these metrics because a, you, you don’t want to check a load of different metrics at once because you’ll get overwhelmed.
And because the question is whatever you’re going to measure, the question is what, so what, what are you going to do with that information, which is why there’s really not much points in measuring things for the sake of it. So a lot of people get very overwhelmed by analytics because it is a load of charts and graphs and stuff if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
And they tend to go into what we call vanity metrics, which is, you know, how many visitors did I get this week, this quarter, whatever? Did I get more than the last week, the last quarter, whatever? And if the answer’s yes, They say, Oh, good, I must be doing it. All right. And then they go off and do something, you know, that they prefer to do, which I understand, but the point is, is deeper than that.
I mean, just because you got more visitors this week than you did last week. So what did you get more business? Did [00:24:00] you get more leads? Are those visitors the right people? Because if you get all the wrong people, you’re not going anywhere. So in my opinion, what I, and what I like to do with clients, I mean, first, the very first thing I, we have to do, which they can leave to me, is to make sure that the implementation is good and the data’s hopefully clean and it’s all properly tagged and all of that good stuff.
I mean, cause obviously if you’re working with bad information, you’re not, you know, you’re not going to make good decisions. However, having done that, at that point, For me, it’s really about, okay, what are you trying to do? And what do you think right now is going well or not going well? And what are the immediate questions that we need to ask?
Like, what would you like to focus on? What would you like to be different? Where are your priorities? Because what I want to do is identify no more than half a dozen things, metrics that we want to take a look at with the potential of taking action on what we find. [00:25:00] And those metrics honestly should be across the customer journey.
So in marketing, we talk about this thing called the customer journey, which is basically, how do you attract somebody’s attention in the first place who’s never heard of you when they’re researching and deciding whether to work with you? How do you work that piece of it? How do you convert them into actual customers?
And then how do you hopefully retain their business? Well, if your business is the sort of business that wants to retain people, I know whenever I see my dentist, you know, I always say, I hope I don’t see you again too soon. And obviously, hopefully sometimes people see lawyers and they don’t want to see them again too soon, but you know, however that works, but all of those aspects of your business are important.
And a lot of people simply focus on the revenue piece, you know, The how, where am I making the money? But if you don’t acquire the right visitors and given that people very rarely go, okay. And it like within two minutes, this is the person I want. If you don’t nurture the potential relationship, then, then you’re not, You’re not going to get the right, the right level [00:26:00] of conversions.
So looking at, at that process and saying, okay, what do we want to know along the way? Like, for example, I was just talking about all the content and things to look at in content, right? That’s part of that engagement piece, the, the nurturing, the, when the person’s thinking about working with you, maybe making their decision.
So you should be saying things like, I wonder how that’s going. Or if you’re doing marketing, then obviously you’ve got to drive people to your site. I see a lot of people, for example, pouring money into social media advertising. And I, I have to say that for the most part, I believe that a lot of that budget is wasted because people who come to your website from social media advertising are very, very rarely good quality to the same extent that people coming to your website from like a Google search are.
Because people in search engines are proactively looking for something. Right. Find me a good business lawyer near me or whatever it might [00:27:00] be. Whereas somebody in Facebook is probably there to see what their friends are doing and watch some videos and hang out. Right. And so you need to know on, on the, on the, where are we getting traffic from side?
For example, where do we get our best types of traffic? Because let’s do more of that. And if we’re doing a load of social media advertising and it’s really not getting us anywhere, why are we spending that money?
LAUREN: And you can confirm this. I hope this is still the case that part of what analytics can look at is where those folks are coming from. So you can see, oh, this stream of people who come from social media, 90 percent of them are dropping out, you know, after two pages. Of clicking. They’re not spending a lot of time on the site, right?
So you can see. So when you say, look at where the streams are coming from and where you’re getting a return and you have those qualified leads, that’s part of what the analytics can do is actually kind of [00:28:00] track those paths, correct?
PHILIPPA: Yeah. So in fact, honestly, I have to say most people from social media don’t even go to two minutes, two minutes on a website.
Two minutes on a website is actually quite a long time in web terms. You know, if I see a visitor spending two minutes, I’m actually quite pleased. And of course it depends on a lot of context and so on.
LAUREN: When we’re thinking about content, I’m assuming that content is still king in terms of Google and like if you want to find more qualified leads and people who are actually actively looking for your services but don’t know about you yet is rich content like actual helpful content and then posting pretty frequently.
Is that still in your experience? What is helping Google drive those search results so that people do find your website? Great.
PHILIPPA: Yeah, although I should be clear that I’m not an SEO expert anymore. I used to do SEO, but yes, although of course Google’s is getting a little more tricky now because they’re [00:29:00] doing all this AI stuff, but that’s got to be based on the content on your site.
So yes, hopefully, but you know, I’d also, the thing about search engines is that they generate good quality traffic, but they’re also, you know, not proactive on your end, you know, you’re waiting for somebody to wake up and say, okay, I need something. So I think it’s also really good to do more proactive things like maybe also record podcasts or videos or, or participate in social media.
And when I said, you know, you can’t advertise on social media, that may not be true in the sense that, for example, if I’ve said lawyer, you know, you might want to advertise. In social media, that’s very dedicated to your area of expertise, you know, or if you’re a family lawyer, you know, but what you really want to do is make sure that you you’re targeting.
So if you’re a family lawyer, you know, maybe targeting people who might be having the sort of conversations that are going to be relevant to your advertising copy. I mean, targeting is for advertising is, is really, [00:30:00] really key.
LAUREN: Yeah, you don’t want to cast a super wide net because you’re going to get everybody who maybe is involved and then you have a lot of kind of silt that flows through.
PHILIPPA: But I think you do want to do a mixture of, of things that are less proactive and things that are more proactive.
LAUREN: And does the analytics, if you have a video on your website, like you were talking about before, will the analytics look at the video itself and sort of where folks are dropping off or what the percentage is?
Does that happen automatically or do you need a different set of tools to actually look at video content? Thank you.
PHILIPPA: So it depends on the tool that you’re using. With Google Analytics, it will automatically track YouTube videos because of course, Google owns YouTube. It will not automatically track other forms of video.
So you can, for example, with Google Analytics, which obviously is still the program that most people. You can customize it, as I keep saying, customizing, it means somebody coming along and writing some little bits of [00:31:00] code that we call tags that tell the analytics to do other things that it’s not doing by default.
So for example, tracking other types of video is one of those things. And for that, you would almost certainly need somebody with a bit of expertise to know how to construct and test those tags.
LAUREN: Gotcha. Okay. That makes sense. Anything you would recommend for somebody who wants to get started, like this may all be very overwhelming to my wonderful listeners.
So if they see the benefit in this, see how it can help their business, like where, where do they start?
PHILIPPA: Depending on how techie you want to get. So, you know, it’s, it’s actually interesting, Lauren, because one of my goals right now, and I just started writing a book, so hopefully, I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to write, but what I’m trying to do is explain all this stuff in English.
So hopefully people listening to our chat haven’t been overwhelmed by techie stuff, because we haven’t, we’ve tried to stay away from it. There’s a lot of techie stuff online and that’s why I, I’m doing this. I mean, if you want, if you want technical, hello, how do you do [00:32:00] this? You can easily find that. On my website, I’ve got an ebook with some stories in it that’s a free download.
Which tells five stories of, of things that people found in, in their analytics, like the story that I told about the employment lawyer where they could make a transformational change either their business or to their website. And that’s in English and it’s got no pie, no charts in their graphs because it’s designed just to inspire business owners to say, I wonder if this kind of thing might apply to me.
If you want that kind of guidance, again, you can look, there’s plenty of groups. LinkedIn has several Google Analytics groups. And you can go there and ask for a recommendation of somebody who can help you. And if you want to hire somebody to help you, one of the things I would recommend that you do is talk to that person and make sure that you feel comfortable, that you can work with them in a way that they’re not going to blind you to the science, if you like, and you’re going to enjoy.
What they can offer, but also, you know, don’t feel like you [00:33:00] have to get to grips with the analytics. I know that when people come to me, you know, when I, when I get a new client, my favorite thing for a new client to ask me is something like Philippa, what do I need to know to run my business better? In other words, they’re not saying Philippa, I want to hire you so you can give me 50 pages of analytics reports because actually they don’t want that.
And I understand that. And so what they’re saying is you do that bit and then you tell me what I need to know and we’ll talk about it. And you can show me if, if I ask you, you can show me what data you’ve got that backs up what you’re saying, which is kind of interesting because it’s basically how I work with my tax accountant, right?
My tax accountant will say to me, do you want to know how I got to that number? And I’ll say no. I just want to know the
LAUREN: number, right? I
PHILIPPA: just want to know the number and where do I sign and do I owe them anything, right?
LAUREN: Otherwise, it’s not, it’s not useful to us as business owners, right? Like, like you said, if you give me a 50 page report and it’s just a bunch of numbers, right?
There might be some hidden gems in there, but you, I need a translator and I need to know, like, how do I implement this? So [00:34:00] having someone like you that can be that kind of intermediary or almost data translator is. Well, it’s, it’s, yeah,
PHILIPPA: it’s, it’s the person who’s going to find the insights and make the recommendations.
So. As I said, if you want to get to grips with it in a more technical manner, and some people do, you know, that’s great. And there’s plenty of resources to support you. If you don’t, I would encourage you not to feel like you have to, as long as you can find somebody who can help you to grow your business in a way that you will understand using that data intelligently on your behalf.
And
LAUREN: if someone is intrigued or found you super helpful as you have been today, or very interested in your ebook where can they find that and get in contact with you?
PHILIPPA: Yeah. So my website is websites that win. com. So hopefully you can put that in the show notes, right? Yep.
LAUREN: Absolutely.
PHILIPPA: And also you can find me on LinkedIn where I’m happy to say that I think my name is completely unique.
LAUREN: You’re very lucky in that way.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. So you know, I’m happy to connect with people on LinkedIn and and [00:35:00] I do offer a free half hour, you know, sort of chat initial get to know you what’s going on. Can I help you kind of chat as well? Answer any very quick questions that you might have.
LAUREN: No, I think that’s so great.
And thank you so much for the time and information today. I can’t stress for the listeners enough. Like this is, this is the reality of the business world that we live in. I know it feels techie or overwhelming or like I have to lawyer end deal with my website analytics, right? Like it’s another thing for us.
To, to manage, but it is the reality of the market and the business world that we’re in. And so if we want to be successful business owners, we have to, we have to deal with it. And hopefully having someone like you who can help us navigate that in a way that’s actually really helpful is the best way to approach it.
Great.
PHILIPPA: Yes. Thank you very much.
LAUREN: Awesome. Thank you. I’m over here giving you a virtual high five because you just finished another episode of A [00:36:00] Different Practice. For more from this episode, head over to adifferentpractice. com slash podcast for the show notes. If you found this episode helpful, I’d love it if you’d share it with someone who might like it too.
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