Getting Started with Google Analytics

[Tom Pounder] Today we're going to talk about how you can get started with Google Analytics and the importance of that. You ready? Because it's time. [Announcer] You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network. [Tom Pounder] Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is a podcast where I bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And today I'm bringing back a friend of mine, Jeremy Zogg. Jeremy and I have been friends for a number of years. We started off by being friends with website stuff and student ministry stuff, but now we've just become more just friends, friend friends, not ministry friends, but more friend friends. And I'm bringing him on the podcast because he is well-versed with websites, and that's what he does currently today. And we're going to talk about Google Analytics and the value of it for your church, your ministry, and just some different tips that he has to share along with Google Analytics. So I'm really excited about this conversation. But before we get into that conversation, I want to remind you to check out thechurch.digital. At thechurch.digital, we have tons of great podcasts, resources, coaching, blog posts, cohorts. There's lots of stuff going on. Online ministry is the place to be. I'm not just saying that because I'm an online guy, but it is the place to be, whether you're doing digital ministry, where it's digital and in-person, whether it's all just digital, or just metaverse ministry, the new ministry track with metaverse ministry. There is lots of different opportunities for you to learn at thechurch.digital. So make sure you check out thechurch.digital, not just this podcast, but all the different podcasts and all the different blog posts and resources that we have there. I would love for you to check that out today. All right, so without any further ado, let's get in the conversation with Jeremy Zogg talking about Google Analytics and the value of it for your church. all right with me right now is my friend jeremy zog jeremy how are you glorious tommy that's good okay i should have i should have said this was all not video related today because but now you're gonna make funny faces and all right oh it's okay so they can't see our our uh i mean so i i have a few people from my podcast that always like to try to mess me up and you're one of those people [Jeremy Zogg] Let's keep it positive. I'll keep it positive and be happy. [Tom Pounder] Okay. Okay. Well, Jeremy, you and I have known each other for quite a number of years, but some people may not know who you are. So to get this started, why don't you share a little bit about who you are and what you currently do? [Jeremy Zogg] right i'm a retired youth minister of 18 years uh 18 years and now so i worked in all non-profits and as you know nonprofits means you don't get much money to market so you got to learn all the skills and tools and trades and tricks which i did yeah and i actually really fell in love with marketing particular digital marketing and so um i kind of was like you know what i uh it was kind of a you know during coven and all that when got certified in front of web development and some digital marketing certifications and landed a job with a software company doing their marketing on their external sites. And so that's what I do now and I love it. So I went from crazy teenagers to now tech. [Tom Pounder] tech which is crazy all within itself um but i bet you a whole lot different uh well it is a whole lot different but a little known fact about jeremy and i um is that jeremy actually like kind of helped me build my first website know and and for the longest time he was kind of my website manager whenever i had a crash i would call him and i'd be like jeremy help me help me and you would take time out and and help me figure things out but thankfully you don't do that anymore and now i have to just well i still call you and ask you website questions like i was asking you before we press play um now now like whenever i see your number i just say what do you want because [Jeremy Zogg] But you're like always trying to be so nice, like, hey, how's your life? Let's pray. I do care. I'm like, all right, what broke on your site? What do we need to fix? [Tom Pounder] Yeah. And then we get all buddy, buddy and talk. Then we get all buddy, buddy and talk. So you are a fantastic student minister. You work for Orange. But what I do love about what you did was exactly what you did is you had a passion for website and you got certifications. And now you got an awesome job and you're working remotely and you can work wherever you want. Too bad you never come up to visit me and work remotely, but that's another story. We can talk about that in private later. But today we're going to talk about Google Analytics. I think it's one of those things that you always hear about. Every website should have Google Analytics and you should be tracking it. But tell me why, Jeremy, to kick us off on this whole thing. Tell us what is Google Analytics and why your church website should have it. [Jeremy Zogg] Google Analytics, you're right, right? Like everyone talks about it. It's like, you gotta have it, you gotta have it. But it's just evolved, it's changed. As you know, technology, websites change. So the biggest tool and great, and it's free, resource is Google Analytics. Why? Because you can measure everything on your website so you can better... You can better manage it more effectively. Um, so it's all data driven. It's that's why I love it. It's data. It's not feelings. You know, it's not, it's like we have data who's visiting our site. Okay. It's a 52 year old. woman who lives in north part of the city you know like we can really drill down data and i love data so let your data to drive decisions and let's define the metrics to better manage your site and that's a big thing right like the website's the open door to the church [Tom Pounder] Yeah, exactly right. And again, we track all sorts of other numbers. Why shouldn't we be tracking who's looking at our website, how long they're staying on our website, what pages are the best and are doing the best and why they're doing it. So you're going to walk us through just three different points here today about Google Analytics and about what that can do for your website. So let's go through with point number one or topic or point. Yeah, point number one. [Jeremy Zogg] yeah so i know everyone's probably so excited to hear about analytics like there's not like people when you say analytics people just light up so great no uh but i i try to make it pretty interactive and drilling down data isn't so fun. So I try to find just really quick, easy tools, simple things that can really give me a dashboard on-site statistics. So the first big thing is install it, right? And we're not going to go through that, but if you do reach out to us, just Google it. Essentially, you just need your tracking code. Then you need to put that in your site. You're using CMS and WordPress. There's a lot of really easy ways to do that. So now you're tracking. now analytics is tracking you right and so um so to make it easier instead of like having to go and drill down in the search console or going to the analytics dashboard there's this amazing google chrome extension called page analytics so that's a free thing go ahead get it and then it will give you a banner right there on the top of your navigation so every page that you're on on your website it will give you the dashboard of what common value or what metrics that google analytics likes to view so one of those big pieces you know um that i really like to talk about is is what what's kind of the analytics that are in the mind of your your your user or the session that you're using so try to think through your audience who's the church member the potential individual that is coming onto your site so think kind of through the psychology of what what do they they want what they need what they're looking for um so a couple things to look at that average session session is one user much time are they staying on that side and that will tell you right there how long four seconds five seconds one second like that's going to tell you a lot right there um the longer the better right the longer yeah you know so obviously and that's another cool thing There's a behavioral flow chart. So we'll look at, all right, so how did this new user come in? And typically for good performing websites, like they're going to land on the homepage. Now, kind of with kind of the growing trend of user experiences, like landing pages should get you everything you need. So typically, and the reason why is because once they leave that landing page, they're only really drilling down to maybe one or two more pages in your site. So I would say a really good, good thing is like five to 10 seconds. And if that you have a very clear CTA of action, then you're doing really, really well there. But another thing kind of to that point is the bounce rate that you want to look at. Um, what's the percentage of these users that are coming to your site and when are they leaving? How, how many of those percentages? So, you know, take a given sample set. Maybe you have 3000 users in a given month and 40% are bouncing after like three seconds. Like that's probably, you might need to kind of start to look at that. But again, these are getting some metrics to kind of arm you for some, for some data. [Tom Pounder] Yeah. I think it's important because, again, you've said a few different things like bounce phrase sessions and whatnot. You can easily just Google just different Google Analytics terms so you can become familiar with the terms. Because again, the idea is you want to keep them on the page. You want to get them is still investing in what is happening on your page. So the longer you can keep them, the better. And if you're not keeping them for very long, then you got to figure out, okay, what adjustments do I need to make? to make sure that people are staying on the page a little bit longer. [Jeremy Zogg] A website is like an organism. It's live, it's well, and it wants to perform and lead the user to what it needs to do. it needs it needs kind of an owner to help shape that experience and they call that user experience so to me that's a lot of fun defining the flow and like kind of the funnel of how you want people to interact and experience your website so once you kind of design that make sure and then you can start to then get very strategic and you develop on you how you want your site [Tom Pounder] Now, Jeremy, do you want to have a lot of different pages on your website or do you want to be very concise on the amount of pages? Does your youth ministry need to have like 20 different pages linked to different things or should it be more concise for that? [Jeremy Zogg] So I guess, again, this is my opinion. There's a lot of different opinions and probably articles that will disagree with what I say. But from what I've seen and based off of Google Analytics and and individuals use you know i what is it like after eight seconds you somebody don't have somebody's attention they're gone so what i say is having a really slick landing page that one page uh very uh image focused and then in that navigation when you click they're called anchor links it will just scroll to that page section on that landing page and then from there you can have a very specific cta so then they can drill down to information they need such as like a calendar or a form or more status on the events or your library so i think that's kind of where so my thing is having a scrolling landing page and then allowing them to choose and click if they want to drill down deeper. But I let them decide that not the design. [Tom Pounder] Yeah. Now, again, if you're listening to this and like, man, I don't even have the foggiest idea what is going on. The reality is. reality is sorry you're you're really you're you're up a creek sorry but the reality is web pages have become very interactive and again uh i like to use wordpress and wordpress is my blog and what i use uh that can be a little bit more tedious some people like to say that that's like the android of smartphones like because you can you can really tailor it and change it the way you want to but there are other websites like squarespace that make this really really easy uh for you to design your own website and again to put google analytics in there is all you do is sign up for it then put your number in where you need to put your number in And you can start tracking immediately. So this is not rocket science. And I know that Jeremy will include his links in the show notes. But he would love to talk to you a little bit more about this as well. [Jeremy Zogg] Sorry, Tom. If you stop me at any time, if there's technical terms or something, I'm using that. confusing but you're doing a great job you're just so smart i just gotta dumb it down for the rest of us like me you know and so this helps me um all right so that that's the first thing that you can do okay so what what would be the second thing that you can do so it's and this is also in part of that page analytics extension it's the heat map i love the heat map for me i'm visual like i like to see it so it makes that data kind of become a little bit more alive um so what a heat map really is and does it's it gives you kind of like a location and a graphical representation of all the site data so it allows you to see how your users are engaging with your website it shows such as like what links they're clicking on what sections of your pages they're most interested in so it really starts to visualize the user behavior And then you can start to use that to your advantage on how it is. So now with Google Analytics and that dashboard gives you the numbers, but this also now gives you kind of a very clear visual of where people are clicking and where they're at on the site. And so you can start to kind of map out some of those behaviors. [Tom Pounder] Yeah, that's really important. And I like this extension. I'm a Safari user, so I'm not really into Chrome, but I do know that there are a few different times that I do actually intentionally use the Chrome browser. It's because they have these great extensions and Google wants you to use their browser and they provide these extensions and they are really, really helpful for you when you're doing website stuff, especially with Google Analytics. I'm very visual as well. And so the idea of this heat map, I've never used it myself, but the idea of this heat map really makes it really clear what's doing good, what's not doing good. And then you can analyze the data and say, what do we need to make changes on? [Jeremy Zogg] Tom Preston- yeah tell me also you bring up like thing like kind of your browser and what you're using that's also a really big part of like your website, making sure that it looks good on safari looks good on chrome looks good on firefox edge and so that's kind of called like. [Tom Pounder] Microsoft Edge. [Jeremy Zogg] yeah that's so like that replaced internet explorer i didn't think they still had i didn't think microsoft still had that stuff yeah you don't you don't know man like a lot of pc based companies you know a lot of their software is built and so because microsoft and they're using teams and it's all integral into their their pc ecosystem they have to use it so dang [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. But that's true. And you have to make it mobile friendly, too. 100%. I mean, because isn't a large part of people looking up on websites, looking from their phones or tablets? [Jeremy Zogg] I think that's, yeah, I forget the statistics, especially in church, in the church arena stats, just because when you're driving past a church sign or a church, the first thing you want to do is like, boom, you Google it right there. So you're on your phone. So it's a very mobile. [Tom Pounder] mobile priority kind of website so yeah good point yeah good so okay this is very helpful um and again i think when you're you're thinking through the these uh things have to think about who your target audience is again it always comes back to who are you trying to reach and if if who you are reaching on your website is different from the target audience you're going to have to make adjustments you're going to have to make some changes on one thing or another maybe you have to start reaching a different kind of person if the different type of people are coming to your website But again, before you get into the analytics, know who you're trying to reach, what that person looks like, what they're into, and all that so that you can really have, you can judge whether or not your website's meeting the needs of your church. So good. All right, so last one. What's your third point? [Jeremy Zogg] Tom shouldn't be using Safari because that's like 10% of all internet users. Did you just look that up? I mean... no no i just i'm like whenever i look at anybody's google analytics like it's a very low percentage that are using safari so for us that we're ever developing websites we hate those people that are using safari because you make our job so much harder anyway sorry [Tom Pounder] tell you okay so just a little background here jeremy is an android user i'm an apple user we fight all the time about these things uh because sometimes we're in group threads together and all that stuff i mean we like to pick and prod each other on these things and so i wait do you have a macbook i do yeah because i think it's i uh it's best for design everything looks so great anyway i'm sorry tom i told you i wasn't gonna bully you on this but it's just so automatic [Jeremy Zogg] yeah there you go thanks jeremy no uh and you can tell like obviously i'm a huge google google fan and it just because that's what especially in the web world what everyone's searching through so so anyway the third piece is just the simple simple and actually i was in a seminar on on exactly google analytics and the uh the presenter said one of the easiest things that you can do to really start to boost a lot of organic search and whatever metrics that you're looking at is having a google business page um again as we're saying here if you scratch Google's back, they're going to scratch your websites back. So they love to capture all that data about your church and they want it updated pretty frequently because again, it's a part of their ecosystem. So they're updating their maps, they're updating the hours, the images, the information, but make sure you have that because whenever somebody searches, that's the number one thing that's going to come right onto the right sidebar. So you really want to have that dialed in in an order, and more updates, the better. And that's going to really please the Google gods. [Tom Pounder] The Google. Well, it's really important. Again, we've done this for a few years at our church, and we've been really trying to be strategic about uploading pictures and whatnot, and actually even getting those reviews. Yeah, good point. Yeah. Google really wants the reviews. Yes. So you can encourage your congregation to give five-star reviews. Even if they hate your church, they can give five-star reviews and just give that because that, again, it bumps your church up so more. So I think that's really important. [Jeremy Zogg] And then kind of that point, like if we were on a team and like all we are on the web team, like we're like, hey, one of our goals is to get more reviews. So then guess what? I would probably really focus on getting a button, making something really good. in our first user experience our website to get more reviews you know and incentivize that so it's just kind of cool like i love how you said that like boom we need more reviews all right how do we go back let's look at the analytics let's change our site to get that and let's test so that's really that to me that's just a lot of fun isn't it tom it's it's glorious jeremy [Tom Pounder] I'd love to see you all giddy about analytics because again, I will be honest again, someone's going to be listening to this podcast and be like, it's just too much for me. But the reality is if I can do it, you can do it. And so the analytics are really important and you really got to examine the data because again, like again, if you. do a blog post and it really catches fire and people really like it. Then you can look at that and say, okay, the data says this type of blog post is really doing well. How can we do more like this? And when you do that, you're going to continue to boost up your numbers and drive people to your website. so that they can learn about god and their lives be changed again this all plays in the picture of their spiritual formation this isn't just about doing a website and getting information this really starts the process because you know jeremy we know the stats right people are going to check out your website first before they come to your church right [Jeremy Zogg] here's the cool thing like we there's one church so just a couple years ago but uh working with them and like looking at the google analytics but it basically defines the demographic that are visiting your church to their hobbies to their interests and you can get all that access so you can hand that off to someone that's teaching that weekend be like hey here are the targets here's the things that they've looked at here's well not necessarily but like here's the there's the hobbies here's kind of the persona the age what what they use what what they like and you know that again just arming you for how to better meet that felt need yeah [Tom Pounder] It's really, really important, really good. And again, if you're on WordPress, they have a variety of different plugins that you can put in to help you read the numbers and a good right from your site. Again, like what Jeremy also said, there's a Chrome extension that will help you as well. So it really will. The more you do this and the more you invest in it, the better you're going to get at reading it and then helping your church. [Jeremy Zogg] and i want to just say like i i kind of for the sake of this conversation i kind of crafted a lane to how to do this but there's so many different ways to do this but the hope the just the motivation is for you to do it and to figure that out there's so many tools out there and plugins so that and there's tons of tutorials so that this is just a way [Tom Pounder] yeah it's it's one way but a good one well jeremy as we wrap up what um what uh how else would you encourage would you give us any final thoughts of encouragement as you're uh we're talking to people about church website stuff yeah i just i always just keep learning uh you know just that's why i love the data like i just pull a monthly report of your site you know and just just see how you're doing [Jeremy Zogg] Set some easy goals. Talk about, you know, people love to hear about like, wow, you know, compliment the people in the church or outside the church that contributed to the website that are doing that. The data is doing showing it's doing really well. People love to hear that. Right. And just just, yeah, keep learning, keep complimenting and have fun. [Tom Pounder] Yeah, well, and I'm glad you said that to Jeremy, too, because the reality is this the person who's doing the Google Analytics doesn't have to be a staff person. It can be a volunteer like we think of volunteers on the level of, oh, can they help out with child care? Can they help out with hospitality? Can they be an usher? Can they be a greeter? But this is a volunteer position where there's probably someone in your church that really geeks out like Jeremy on this kind of stuff and would love to check your Google Analytics and give you the reports that you need. So this could really be a very good volunteer opportunity. [Jeremy Zogg] great point tom i never thought about like that it's not scary that's another thing like people like i always get spooked out about it but it's so one it's so easy and google obviously they know what they're doing they're trying to make it as user friendly as possible so it's not you're not like relinquishing over like confidential data yeah you know when you when you link it up it's just it's just tracking who's coming to your site [Tom Pounder] Yeah, it's great. It's very helpful. And Jeremy, thanks for taking some time to talk to me about this. How can someone can connect with you if they got a question for you? [Jeremy Zogg] Just go to, you can go to my portfolio websites, just jeremyzock.com, kind of crafts out, you know who I am on, I'm on Instagram. You can connect with me on eBay, jz to the JC. I made that account, I think, in 2000 when I started really getting serious about the Lord. So you can check. I almost have 100% feedback there. [Tom Pounder] I do. I have like a 98% on eBay. [Jeremy Zogg] Yeah, that's what I do. [Tom Pounder] Oh, gosh. Jeremy is on Twitter too, but he's not. [Jeremy Zogg] Yeah, I texted you. I was like, I'm going to get back on that once Elon really overhauls it. [Tom Pounder] Yeah, there you go. That would be great. I hope he doesn't back out on that. Jeremy, as always, it's great talking with you and seeing you. So thanks, man. Right on. [Jeremy Zogg] Later. [Tom Pounder] All right. So what did you think? What did you think of our conversation with Jeremy? Again, Jeremy, as I said earlier in the interview, he's one of those guys that just purposely tries to mess me up or tries to distract me in some way. But I love having him on. He's a great friend and he has a lot of knowledge with website stuff. So I would love to hear from you. What encouraged you? What challenged you? What made you think a little bit? Or what questions do you have? Definitely. put it in the comment section below, or you can hit me up on Twitter at TAPounder. You can even hit up Jeremy on Twitter, and I'll include all his contacts in the show notes today. All right, heroes. Well, thanks so much for being with me today. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, go and subscribe to it. It's on iTunes, Spotify. It's on YouTube. You can find it at the church.digital. You can find it at the Digital Bootcamp Facebook group. You can find it all over. So just subscribe to it. It's all in the show notes. We'd love for you to connect in that way. right here is where i hope you have a great rest of the day until next time have a great one