Lauren:  Hey everyone, welcome back to Publish & Prosper. I can't. This is episode 47. And fun fact, actually, 47 is my lucky number. It's my favorite number. I have it tattooed on me, although it's my least favorite tattoo of all the ones that I have.

Matt: How did 47 become your lucky number? 

Lauren: It was an inside joke that we had in high school that my yearbook advisor actually used and passed it down through all of the different yearbook and video yearbook staff. So it's like a running inside joke for years that 47 is the most commonly recurring random number. I mean, it's not true. 

Matt: Oh. 

Lauren: Like it's absolutely not true, but it creates that like Bader Meinhoff phenomenon where once you are, once you're paying attention to it, you notice it more and more frequently. 

Matt: Got it. Yeah. 

Lauren: So it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's the most commonly recurring random number. But it also has - the roman numeral for the number 47 is XLV11 and LV are my initials. So I have a roman numeral 47 tattoo. 

Matt: You're a very multi-layered person. 

Lauren: That's true. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: That’s true.

Matt: Quick shout out to Paul's wife, Susie, for these cookies. 

Lauren: I know. 

Matt: By the way. 

Lauren: Yeah, Matt and I brought snacks so, sorry in advance. Great ASMR for the podcast. 

Matt: Well, I won't eat anymore. But for anybody who's never had a snickerdoodle with pumpkin, which I have not, and I was a little trepidatious about it, it's really good. 

Lauren: Yeah. I sent her a text this morning after I had one of these cookies and I was like, I got to tell you, I don't even like pumpkin and I am fully here for these cookies. 

Matt: Yeah. Well, and now I took the whole thing off Paul's desk. 

Lauren: Yeah. Matt literally brought the whole box of cookies in. We're doing great. Everyone on this team loves us. 

Matt: It's fine.

Lauren: It's so fine. Anyway, today for lucky episode number 47, we are going to be talking about how to make the most of your metrics and data. It's something that we talk about a lot when we're talking about the benefits of selling direct. And we talk about like, how valuable it is to have access to your customer data and all that, but that's definitely not the only kind of useful data that you should be paying attention to, and that you should have access to, and that you should be tracking. 

 Matt: Yeah. I mean, you used the word should a lot. But for the average person who's not a marketer or somebody who spends a lot of time looking at data or metrics that surround certain marketing activities or sales activities, like, this is not an easy thing to start doing. 

Lauren: Right.

Matt: It's hard to know where to start and how to get rolling with it. And then once you've figured out the different metrics and pieces of data that you kind of should be looking at, you then have to figure out - or get somebody to help you understand, like - what do I do with those metrics and that data? 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: And how do I turn that into something useful and helpful? And if you want to back up a few steps, in many cases, people are starting from scratch, like, well, I don't even know if I'm collecting the data, right? Just cause you have a website or social media channels, that doesn't mean you're actually collecting the data you need to be collecting. 

Lauren: Right. And there is also, we get caught up in the abundance of data. If you are collecting it, great. I'm going to get into this, I'm going to go look at my social media metrics and you open up Facebook analytics and you look at it, there's a ton of data in there, and it's not all stuff that you need to worry about.

This episode actually was inspired by my friend Anne who listens to this, who is a freelance editor. And she reached out to me a while back, sorry, Anne, asking about data tracking and metric tracking. And that's basically what she said, was she was like, I know that I'm supposed to be doing this, but I don't even know where to start. And I just feel like I'm like flailing around trying to figure out what to look at and what it means. 

Matt: Yeah. The question seems to be more of two parts, actually. The, the second part we can address right here at the top of the show, which is, this idea that she feels like she's flailing around. I mean, don't feel bad, and most people are flailing around their data, they don’t - 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Even the ones who have a ton of it, in many cases, they're still flailing around with it. And even big companies, medium-sized companies, everybody deals with these data issues to a degree. It’s - you just have to make the choice to jump in and get started and figure out where. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: So that's what we're here to help with, hopefully. 

Lauren: Hopefully. And everyone else too, not just Anne. 

Matt: And eat lots of cookies. 

Lauren: So many cookies. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: You want to get started? 

Matt: Sure. Let's go ahead and read Anne's statement though. Anne said to Lauren, basically, I know I need to track and see if my social media is bringing people to my website and what does best. So I'm not just flailing around, but can fine tune my planning. But even when I look at my numbers, I feel like I'm flailing. Yes, you and a lot of other people. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: So first off, again, don't feel bad. Second off, we're going to jump into that. We're going to start by talking about the different kinds of metrics that you should have at your disposal. A lot of it is there. You just need to know where to look. And then some of it, you may actually need to enable it within whatever platforms you're using. Or in some cases, you may need to use a third party tool. And there are some out there that are fairly easy to use, some maybe not so much. But the main types of data that most of you are going to have access to immediately would be your social media data. And if you have a website - which hopefully you do - your website data. 

Lauren: Even if you're not selling direct. 

Matt: Right right right, yeah. Website separate from a store. 

Lauren: Like, website - yeah.

Matt: Yeah. Forget about selling direct for a minute. Website data, social media data, and hopefully you've got an email list started, and if you do, you have email metrics, obviously, at your disposal. The other pieces of data that we will talk about, obviously, are related to selling direct, and that's customer data. And within that customer data, you can break that out by transactional data versus behavioral sales data. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Man, I don't know why I bothered to outline this episode. I knew you would have this one in the bag.

Matt: I don’t - I'm looking through your outline now. No, you did pretty good. 

Lauren: Oh, thanks. That's so nice. 

[6:08] Social Media Metrics

Matt: Let's kind of start in the order people might actually be using it. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: I think for the most part, everybody's got some sort of social media they're doing. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Not everybody's going to have a website. Not everybody's selling direct, unfortunately. But let's start with social media because that's probably the easier one for most people to really start to wrap their heads around. And it is kind of the basis of Anne's question too. 

Lauren: Yeah. Also, you don't have to twist my arm to talk about social media metrics. 

Matt: Well, good. You jump in while I finish this cookie. 

Lauren: Okay. I got you. There are a lot of things that you're going to want to look at when you're looking at your social media metrics. There's going to be a ton of stuff put right in front of you. I'm going to try to narrow it down to help people out here, but I'm going to be very transparent from the top that what metrics are valuable to you is going to vary very much depending on what platform you're using. 

So I'm not going to break this down by individual platform. That's a whole episode. We don't have time for that. High level, easiest way to look at it is when you're looking at social media metrics, vanity metrics don't mean anything. 

Matt: What's a vanity metric? 

Lauren: Metrics like likes and your total follower count. Like things that if you have a post that has a thousand likes on it, that doesn't mean that you have a thousand people interested in your content. 

Matt: No, it doesn't.

Lauren: It doesn't. Like that doesn't really mean anything. 

Matt: Well, but even if you did, what matters is: did they click over and buy something from you?

Lauren: Right. Did you convert them in some way? Did they, did they like your post and then come follow you? Did they like your post and then come look at your profile to see who you were? Did they like your post and then click on your website? Odds are they didn't. So likes don't really mean a whole lot. 

The caveat that I will give to the statement that followers don't mean a whole lot, cause like we've talked about in other episodes, you could have 50,000 followers and get three likes on every post and zero comments and no saves and no clicks. 

Matt: Yeah. Again, follower accounts are not indicative of anything. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: Because these days, 25,000 of those could just be bots. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: And more than likely a good percentage of it is bought followers and traffic. But again, ultimately none of those vanity metrics matter if they're not clicking over and either signing up for your email newsletter or buying a book from you -

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: - off your website or wherever you're sending them to buy your book. But hopefully after this episode, if you're not already, you'll be convinced to try selling direct. 

Lauren: Yeah. So that is, so then the caveat that I'm gonna add to that follower metrics is that you should track your follower growth over time. Because that will tell you… if you're seeing that your growth rate is trending steadily, you're doing something right. You're consistently keeping people engaged, interested in your content, finding new people, reaching new people. If you see that your audience growth is plateauing, then there's probably something that you need to do to change that. There's something that you need to adjust in order to change that, so. 

Matt: Yeah, I would give one caveat here. 

Lauren: Okay, a caveat to my caveat? 

Matt: Oh, that's right. That was a caveat. 

Lauren: Yeah, go ahead. 

Matt: I'm going to caveat on top of your caveat. 

Lauren: All right, go ahead. 

Matt: Is it caveat or caveat? 

Lauren: Uh, I think that's debatable.

Matt: Weren't you the one who dinged me for niche versus niche? 

Lauren: Yes, I am. But I do think that caveat is more of an accent thing than it is like a word pronunciation thing. 

Matt: Okay. My caveat is this - is thus - this. Yes, tracking follower growth over time can be an indicator that what you're doing in terms of content delivery on these platforms is working. Agreed. I do still think, however, though, the more important metric is are you seeing growth in your subscriber count on your email newsletter list, which we'll get to, or are you seeing growth in the purchasers on your website? 

So yes, I would say you can look at follower growth on social media as somewhat of a leading indicator of whether or not what you're doing is right, but the trailing and more important indicator would be found in what are the conversion points that you're trying to encourage? Are those growing. If follower count is growing on social media and in tandem your newsletter subscriber count is growing, or your book sales from your website are growing, or both then great. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Everything is aligned and synced up, it means you're doing what you need to be doing to grow that audience on social media. But you're also doing the more important task of getting them from social media over to where it really matters. Again, follower growth over time, it's a good metric to keep an eye on because it will kind of give you a leading indicator of whether or not what you're doing is working - 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: - resonating, and finding new people. But if it doesn't mean that it's corresponding to, or if it's not corresponding to growth on your email newsletter or your sales, then the growth in follower count means nothing.

Lauren: Yeah. I think actually that's probably a good point to make overall for this whole episode. A lot of these metrics are interconnected, and that's kind of the whole point in tracking them and in paying attention to them. And I know that's going to sound really overwhelming as we rattle off a bunch of different types of metrics that you should be looking at, but they really do inform each other in a lot of different ways. 

And it is important to kind of - even if you just narrow in your focus on like, these are the like, top three metrics that I'm going to consider in each of these categories that we talk about in this episode. And you just say like, okay, I'm going to focus on these three in each of these. That's really not that many. And especially when you see how they impact each other and how they're connected to each other. 

So, for example, one of the metrics you're going to see a lot on social media is going to be impressions. I don't consider impressions to be a high level important metric. They're mostly interesting in it's able to tell you like, the story behind your more important metrics. So… like your impressions are telling you how many people saw your post. They're telling you how many people your content reached. They're not telling you how people engaged with that content. 

But like, if you're seeing my post got 100 impressions on it, but I got 57 engagements, that's great. That's insane. Like if you got an over 50% engagement rate on a post that only had a hundred views on it, that's great statistics.

It's also good for telling you if you're trying to test… You know, I'm trying to game the algorithm right now and I'm trying to figure out how, you know, I read somewhere that if you put the phrase link in bio in an Instagram caption, then Instagram is going to suppress your content. So I'm gonna try three different posts this week and one of them I'm gonna say, link bio, one of them I'm not gonna say link in bio and one of them I'm gonna say link in bio in the comments of the post. And then you can look at the impressions on all three of those posts and see which one had the highest reach. And then you can see like, okay, yeah, it looks like the one that said link in bio and it had a significantly lower number of impressions than the other two. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Something to consider. All of that is to say that the actual like, most important metrics that you should consider when you're looking at your social media metrics are going to be engagements. And by engagements, I mean, are people sharing your posts? Are people saving your posts or favoriting them or whatever, depending on pinning them, depending on which platform you're on? If you are using a platform that has links in it, so like not Instagram or TikTok, but one that you can actually put links in the post itself. Did people click on the links?

Those are the metrics that matter to you. People engaging with your content. And not just liking it and moving on, but something that actually implied that they stopped long enough to be interested in it, to save it for future reference, to share it with somebody else or to post it to their own page or something like that. 

Those are the metrics that matter to you more than anything else. And then link clicks, obviously, because hopefully what you're linking to in that post is linking them to your other content. Yes?

Matt: Sorry. 

Lauren: It's okay. 

Matt: So I was - real quick. I was just going to have ChatGPT create a diagram of kind of what we're talking about, how you cultivate people in social media. Then you bring them over to your owned platforms.

Lauren: Wow.

Matt: Then you convert them into book buyers and then you remarket to them, blah, blah, blah. I was going to just put it up behind us so people could kind of get a visual representation of how it's just - can you just quickly look at what ChatGPT gave me when I asked it for that simple flow? Now, first of all, it's spelled followers wallowers. I don't know if that was purposeful or not. Maybe there's some tongue-in-cheek there. But if you look at the flow that it's saying, it makes zero sense. 

Lauren: It's a -

Matt: It's multi-direction -

Lauren: Wait.

Matt: It's like, and what is that? 

Lauren: Maybe, maybe you should put it up on the screen. 

Matt: That is, I mean. 

Lauren: Hold on. 

Matt: Wild. 

Lauren: I’m gonna - I’ll - we'll cut the dead air on this out because this is worth it. This is the first time it's been worth it to have that. Wow. Okay. 

Matt: Can you - Can you see that?

Lauren: I don't know if you can or not, but I'll also find a way to like put it in the video somehow. Yeah. Wollower's is incredible. I kind of want it to be a pun, but even if it is a pun, then it should probably be spelled W-A-L-L-O-W-E-R-S. So I'm guessing it's just a typo. But also like this is a dead end. All roads lead to Facebook, according to that. 

Matt: Yeah. I don't. I mean. 

Lauren: Oh, that's incredible. 

Matt: Holy cow. All right.

Lauren: Wow. 

Matt: Sorry, we were going to try to give you guys like, an easy sort of Venn diagram or a flow diagram of what we're talking about, but you'll just have to kind of follow along with your imagination. Certainly this is not… 

Lauren: Cause that's not it. Oh, well, we tried. Anyway, why it's important for you to look at your social media metrics: obviously, your social media metrics can be really valuable for you because they will tell you not only how your content is performing, but also like, what kind of content is performing really well for you. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I think it's really important, and I know this is hard to do unless you're using like, a really robust tool like Sprout Social. Sprout has a great post tagging tool, but it's also very expensive for an individual or small business owner, so I'm not encouraging you to use that. But if you have some kind of way for yourself to kind of keep track of what different types of posts you are creating on different social platforms, so that you can know for yourself, okay, this was a post that was advertising a promotion that I'm doing and included a promo code in it. And this was a post that was promoting my book. And this was a post that had a review. And this was a post that didn't have a clickable link in it, like whatever it is, like create some different content buckets for yourself so that you can see performance trends over time. 

Matt: Yeah. You can actually do the reverse of that too though. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: So again, Lauren is very spreadsheet driven and very organized, but if you want to do it the quick and dirty way, just again, download your data from whatever site it is you're using and just sort it based on most engagement. So most likes, most clicks, whatever that might be, that will still give you some kind of indicator of which content people did find more enjoyable or helpful or entertaining. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: And then from there, you'll be able to figure out, okay, these top five posts that I made, maybe they all have a common theme, which they probably do. And maybe that common theme was, you know, around the plot line of your latest book. Or maybe it was about a specific character in one of your books and those posts got the most engagement because people resonate with that character the most. Or maybe it was a theme from your nonfiction book around how to spend less time on social media yet still get the same amount of results. Either way, that data is very telling and you can take those top posts and now you know what kind of content to recreate to get more engagement and get more people involved.

Lauren: Right. And specifically to get more engagement and more people clicking on your content and going to your page. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Because that's something that's really important. I was at a session at Content Marketing World last week that was put on by somebody from SparkToro, and they were sharing a report that they've done recently that was about Google Analytics and different information about the zero click… basically, that's going on with Google Analytics where - or with Google in general, where now they're generating answers immediately on Google, so people don't have to click into different websites to get answers anymore. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: But one of the sidebar things that they mentioned in there is that a bunch of different social media platforms have either partially or fully hidden referral data when they're reporting data to Google Analytics, because they don't want to encourage people to leave their platforms. Like Twitter doesn't benefit from you clicking on a link on Twitter and going to another website from there. They don't want you to do that. They want you to stay on Twitter. They're just going to keep you there as much as they can. 

So they're not going to be like accurately reporting the referrals from their website to other places. And they're also not going to be encouraging people to engage with posts that are leaving their platforms and going to other places. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So like, these are all things you got to keep in mind as you're working on this. So you got to figure out how to play the game and you do that by tracking your metrics. 

Matt: As a side note - so I don't know if you were listening to Amanda or Rand Fishkin talk. 

Lauren: It was, it was Amanda, but she was sharing stuff that Rand had reported. 

Matt: Right. Anyways, SparkToro is actually a great tool to help you build your audience.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Via social media and other channels. It's not overly expensive. So again, if you're really hard pressed to try and build your audience pretty quickly, Spark Toro - S P A R K T O R O - is a great tool for that. It's really good for helping you find new audiences based on potentially people you already follow or the reader segments and audiences that you're interested in. It's a really good tool to look at. 

Another great tool to help you build engagement, but meaningful engagement on social media, not just some bot clicks or things like that, is ManyChat. So most of you have probably seen now at some point a post where somebody said, hey, I've got this really valuable thing. If you comment below and they'll give you some word like book or course or whatever. Emo. If you put that in the comments, you'll get this for free. 

Well, what they're doing is they're using ManyChat. And when you put that keyword, that trigger word down in the comments, ManyChat engages with you. It's a way to start engagement with somebody. And it's a way to build relationships and two way communication, which will then be the catalyst to get them over to your email newsletter or your website. ManyChat is a really great tool right now to use on social media for meaningful engagement opportunities. And it's relatively inexpensive. It's priced based on the number of contacts that you actually engage with per month. So it'd be anywhere from free to for 1,500 conversations in a month, you might pay 80 bucks for that month or something. 

It's meaningful engagements with actual human beings that are interested in what you have to say and will more than likely turn into either newsletter subscribers or book purchasers. 

Lauren: Which is the goal of all of this. Whether we're talking about social media metrics, email metrics, even website traffic metrics and data and stuff like that, like - all of this is leading you towards the goal of conversions of some kind. Whether that's book sales, email newsletter signups, people subscribing to your Patreon, people buying a pass to your online classes, whatever it is. All of this stuff, you're looking at this because you are trying to figure out how to move the needle on people leaving these different platforms and coming to you. 

Matt: No notes. 

Lauren: Thanks. That's great. Also, I will link SparkToro and ManyChat in the show notes. 

Matt: Good. 

Lauren: When it comes to tracking your analytics on social media, your best bet is probably going to be to use whatever built-in tools you have in the platforms themselves. They all have very robust tools. They're also the most accurate. So if you're using a third-party tool, if you're using a third-party scheduling tool, most of them will integrate with the analytics tools within your different social media platforms. So if you're trying to look at all of them together, that's a good option for you. But I always found discrepancies between the native analytic data reporting and the third party data reporting. 

Matt: Yeah. And I mean, obviously the native one is probably a little more accurate than the third party.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: Everybody knows these days Google Analytics is a nightmare, but whatever.

Lauren: Yeah. 

[21:41] Email Marketing Metrics

Matt: All right. Let's talk about from social, hopefully you're driving them somewhere. And more than likely, you're either going to be driving them to your email newsletter sign up page or your website. 

Lauren: Right. So do you want to talk about email or website next? 

Matt: Let's start with email. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: But it really doesn't matter which one you're doing now - or sending people to - as long as it's one of those things, because either one you can then cycle in the other at some point. Let's say you're driving everybody to your email newsletter sign up. Great. The metrics you're going to want to look at, you know, with your email for the most part are open rates, click rates - which are also somewhat vanity metrics, but somewhat not - and then ultimately there are going to be some CTAs that you're asking for in your email. 

So if you have a website and you're selling direct, clearly many of your emails should have some call to action for people to buy your book, or books, or sign up for your online course, or whatever it is that you're trying to actually monetize. That's where you're asking for that sale is in those emails. As well as hopefully providing some sort of valuable or entertaining content in there. Otherwise, they're just going to get tired of you pitching to them all the time and they'll unsubscribe. 

But anyways, you're going to look at open rates, you're going to look at click rates, and then you're going to look at some sort of conversion rate from those emails. So if the click through or the CTA, if the click through button is taking them to somewhere to buy your book, you're going to want to look at how many book sales are you getting from these emails? And each email will have its own metrics, its own open rate, its own click through rates and its own revenue data attached to that. If, again, the CTA is for book sales… which I'm assuming most people listen to this or after book sales. But it could be other things. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Online courses or whatever. Anything to add to that? 

Lauren: Not really. I did ask Laurie, our email marketing manager, any recommendations she had for this. And she said - just to put this in there - that the order that she would rank them in, in order from most important to least important of those three, was: conversion rates, click rates, and open rates. So, now if you're trying to prioritize what your metric tracking is. 

Matt: Again, open rates, click through rates, those are leading indicators. The trailing indicator is the revenue. So if the CTA is to drive people to purchase, that's what you're concerned with. If the CTA is to drive people to sign up for online course, same thing, that's really what you wanna be tracking. Now, this necessitates that you're actually able to track that. Because if you're sending an email out once a week or once every two weeks or whatever, and you're asking people to buy your book and you're sending them to Amazon, you're not going to have the data as to whether or not they bought a book from that email. Because the minute they go to Amazon to buy your book, your tracking is broken. That's it. 

Lauern: Right. You won't know. 

Matt: Nope.

Lauren: You'll just, you'll know that you sent them somewhere and you won't know if they actually purchased the book or not. 

Matt: Yeah. So once again, having a direct sales path is going to be what completes your data cycle and allows you to actually see from start to finish, did you acquire a new follower who turned into a new purchaser and thus hopefully a fan or follower for quite some time that will buy most of your books, if not all of them. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: So yeah, I agree with that ranking though. I think that's really smart. Obviously the most important one is are people converting, and then after that open rates and then yes, click the rates. Open rates depend on who you talk to mean nothing or mean a lot, it just depends. But at the end of the day, you gotta get people to open the email, which means you have to A, be promising some really good content to them to get them to sign up, and B, those subject lines better be pretty clever - 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: - and not landing in the spam folder. 

Lauren: Yeah, that's the hard part. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Another metric that I wanted to just throw out there, in the same way that we were talking about social media followers and tracking that, is just kinda keeping an eye on your unsubscribe rates. I think that, you know, I wouldn't consider it a super, super top tier important metric. But if it's something that you're looking at and you're going, hmm, you know, I've noticed that every single time that I send this particular type of email out, I see a spike in unsubscribes. Maybe that's worth noting. Or if you changed something, if you - if you did something that you tried a new format, or a new subject line style, or you targeted a different list of people, and you saw a sharp uptick after that email in unsubscribes that is a key indicator that something wasn't right about that. 

Matt: Yeah and let's be clear unsubscribes in and of themselves are not bad they're actually good.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Right? 

Lauren: You want to have a healthy email list. 

Matt: But what Lauren's saying is the key here is when you notice irregularities in that unsubscribe rate most of the time you'll carry an average unsubscribe rate it'll be less than one percent, hopefully, because you don't want to have a high churn rate. You don't want to be bringing in all these new contacts and new subscribers, but also have an unsubscribe, a weekly unsubscribe rate of like 50%. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: That's not good. But for most people, it's less than 1%. And it's good to have an unsubscribe rate. You don't want people on your list taking up space that don't care about getting your newsletters. They're probably never gonna buy anything from you. For whatever reason, they came over because they were curious, but decided it's not a fit for them. That is okay. They're not your core audience. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It's not a big deal. What she's saying is accurate. Look for the irregularities, the spikes, things like that, because that is a strong signal that something's wrong. So yeah, very important. The other thing again, when we talk about conversion rate, every email should be asking them to do something. Now, it won't always be buy this book or buy my latest book or buy this trilogy or whatever that might be. If you don't have a website yet, get a website built and then alternate newsletter CTAs. You know, sometimes you're just gonna ask them to go over and check out your new website. And hopefully if that website's been created and designed in a pretty effective manner, you'll get them to convert there on the website, which is really what you want them to do.

Lauren: And what we're gonna talk about next. 

Matt: That's right, that's the point. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: So there are other CTAs or actions you can ask them to take too, that aren't just, hey, buy this book, visit my website, whatever. But again, those are the most important. The whole goal is to sell more books, right? And so you can keep writing and keep selling. I would be asking people to purchase or to check out the website. 

Lauren: Yeah. I noticed that - actually, I realized that recently with an author that I am subscribed to her newsletter that comes out, I think it's once a month. And she always - anytime she includes an announcement of anything in her newsletter, she doesn't put the actual announcement in the newsletter. 

Like she… the most recent one that I got was a cover reveal for her next book that's coming out. And the body of the email included, you know, I'm really excited about this cover. I worked with this designer. It goes, it lines up really well with all my other covers. Like I really love these fun elements on it, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But she didn't include the actual cover in the email. The email links to the exclusive news article that has the cover reveal in it. 

So it's a great way to get me to click on the link, because the whole point of the email was like, oh, I do actually, I opened this because I want to see the cover of this new book. And now I have to click on this link in this email to go see this cover. To be fair, I'm not saying this would work for -

Matt: To be fair. 

Lauren: I'm not saying this would work for everybody. This is a New York Times bestselling author. This is maybe the exception and not the rule, but it is something that I've noticed as a trend in her emails. And I do think it's interesting, something that I've actually, that has actually caught my attention. 

Matt: I think the fact that she's in New York Times bestsellers is irrelevant. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: What I would say is that's a very clever thing to do, but it's probably a very hard thing to pull off. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: In other words, you have to be very clever because you have to keep that reader engaged on the email and get them excited enough to then click over somewhere else to see the actual cover. You also run the risk of just pissing somebody off because you're building and building and building and building and building. And then it's like, wait, now I got to go somewhere else to see this thing. 

Like, she clearly did it really well because by the end you were like, okay, it doesn't matter what you want me to do. I'm going to do it. So I'm going to click here and go see this thing, but be careful with that. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: Like, if your intention is to do something clever like that, make sure it's clever, maybe have somebody read it over and give you a little bit of feedback. But it is a good idea if you can pull it off because yes, it's just another way to get people over to your website, hopefully to make a purchase. 

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. It is also something - I'm sorry, you go ahead.

Matt: I was just going to say we didn't really talk about this, but the last thing to do with email specifically is there are email platforms and tools where you can actually sell from your email. So when we say, you know, a CTA of buy this or go to the website, the two aren't always the same thing, right? You can use a tool like ConvertKit - or now they're called Kit - but Kit and some others like them, one or two others, they do have built-in functionality for you to be able to sell certain things directly out of your email, which is great. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: You don't have to have a website right away if you've already started building an email list. Hopefully you've started building it on a platform that will allow some ecommerce abilities like Kit or some of these others. But if not, you definitely need to get started on a website and the CTA should be to get them over to the website. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Right? Okay. 

Lauren: Which is also that ties in with what I was gonna say, which is that the catch for doing this kind of style where you're basically, leading people directly to the CTA in your email is that that has to be the most important thing in your email. Because I guarantee you I never go back to read the rest of Emily's emails once they’re… Once I've clicked out of it, I never go back. That's something that you have to keep in mind if that's a trick you want to play. So sometimes having the option to be selling directly from your email like that could be super useful. 

Matt: Sure. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: As you could probably tell from a lot of what we're talking about, ideally all roads would lead to your website. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: And you'd have a website with a store where you can sell your books. But we understand that's not always the case. We're going to talk about websites anyways, though. 

Lauren: Yes, we are. Although before we do that real quick, I just want to add that just like social media, the best place for you to find your email metrics is within your ESP. 

Matt: Oh yeah. 

Lauren: Like that'll always be built in - any email service provider that you're using will have your metrics built into that. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: Yep. Okay. Now you can talk about websites. 

Matt: Now I can talk about it?

Lauren: I know you're chomping at the bit, so go ahead. 

Matt: Hey, you keep doing your thing. That's fine.

[31:31] Website Metrics

Matt: Again, some key metrics to pay attention to for your website. And again, you can pull these all out of the admin for your website. We talk a lot about Shopify and Wix and some of these others, they all have built-in analytics and tracking. They're very easy to pay attention to what's going on. So obviously we suggest building your site on one of those platforms because there's also built-in ecommerce abilities. 

But you're going to want to look at things like unique page visitors, so the actual person or visitor that came to your site. Page views and session duration are two other metrics. Page views are a bit of a vanity metric and can be misleading, but it's still good to know how many of the pages on your site somebody's looking at before they actually make a purchase or leave. Session duration is kind of the same thing. You can see an average session duration of let's say 1.5 minutes. 

I mean, it doesn't tell you a lot. Unless you have a massive website, you know, with 27 different pages, and the average session duration is 42 seconds - you have too much crap on your website. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: People are spending an average of 40 seconds, 42 seconds, and then leaving or, you know, whatever. In that sense, yes, session duration can be helpful. 

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, I would consider session duration to be something that's valuable to tell you if you're doing something wrong. 

Matt: These are all valuable to tell you if you're doing something wrong. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: You'd like to have some metrics that are telling you if you're doing something right. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: Session duration can also do that potentially. Could somebody hit your website, purchase a book and check out in under five minutes? Absolutely. So in that sense, if your average session duration is eight and a half minutes, I mean, what is that actually telling you? Again, it's going to be different for everybody. Session duration, yeah, I would use that one lightly unless it's just like really, really low. 

Lauren: It could also be telling you that I clicked on your website, opened it up, looked at it, and then got interrupted by somebody and put my phone down and left my phone sitting on my desk for five minutes and had a conversation with you and then went back to picking my phone up and looking at it again. Like it doesn't…

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: But that to me, like I think that if you're on your website and you're seeing that you have an average session duration of ten seconds, that means that you're doing something wrong. That means that there's something that you're doing here… And the same with the next metric that we have on here is bounce rate, which is how quickly are people leaving - 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: - your site after landing on a page. And those those two pieces of information can tell you like, okay, you know, maybe I drove a bunch of traffic to my website from a social media ad campaign that I was doing or another kind of social post or an email. And clearly I marketed it incorrectly, or I have it - I have the wrong audience targeting here, or I misled people to what kind of content was going to be on this page in some way, because I did the work of driving people from a third party platform to my website. And then once they got here, they immediately left. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So what happened?

Matt: Well, it could be any number of things too. There was one time here at Lulu where we created a landing page for coloring books and these are coloring books that adults are using, you know, whatever. 

Lauren: I don't know where this story is going. 

Matt: We thought, okay, we'll spin up a landing page. It's devoted solely to coloring books and it will help people understand how to create coloring books and also which are the bestsellers on Lulu, they could just buy one in all those things. Well, when creating the page, you obviously pick what the URL is going to be, right? So for every page you design your website, you can designate what that URL is. You need to think about these things. 

Well, we just went with adult coloring books because they were coloring books for adults. However, when that page was getting extremely lackluster traffic, we started kind of looking at the content on the page. It seemed fine. We took a look at the URL and realized. Wow, most people, if they look at the URL that we're trying to send them to, or, you know, when they hover over the click button and they see adultcoloringbooks.lulu.com, they're probably thinking that these are coloring books with adult content in them. So we had to change that URL slug and then we did see better traffic. 

There are all different kinds of reasons why somebody might not be spending time on your site or not even coming to your site. And you need to think about those things. But nonetheless. I think the most important one, again, is going to be conversion rates. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: So these other metrics will tell you when something is wrong for sure. Some might give you a pretty good indicator when something is going right. The ultimate indicator when things are going right is always going to be conversion rate for all of these things, by the way, your ultimate goal is to sell a book. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: All roads should lead to however you get somebody to purchase a book, wherever they do that. And primarily that should be on your website, unless you just have a really good robust newsletter that allows for those transactions to happen. Conversion rate, absolutely the most important one. And that's the one that, you know, again, you really should pay the most attention to. Unless that thing is super low, then you go back and look at those other metrics. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: Right?

Lauren: Those other metrics are still valuable -

Matt: Sure. 

Lauren: - because they're still, they're still important in informing you the success or failure of your efforts, but all of your efforts are to get people to some kind of conversion on your website. So that's where it like, you know, like Matt just said, that is your number one metric on all of these. 

Matt: Are you eating Skittles? 

Lauren: I mean, I haven't actually eaten any since we started recording, but I did open a bag of Skittles - 

Matt: Really? 

Lauren: - before we started recording. 

Matt: Of all that candy we have in there, in the break room, you pick Skittles? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Is that your thing? 

Lauren: It's my favorite non-chocolate candy. 

Matt: Oh. 

Lauren: I'm not a big candy person in general. 

Matt: I'm not either. 

Lauren: I'm definitely 

Matt: I’m a cookie person.

Lauren: I am more of a cookie person than a candy person, but I'm also more of a savory than sweet. 

Matt: Yeah, yeah. 

Lauren: Either way. 

Matt: I'd much rather have a plate of french fries -

Lauren: Same. 

Matt: - than a piece of cake. 

Lauren: Absolutely, 100%. Although I have unfortunately turned myself into my grandmother where every time that I eat a meal, I follow up that meal with, I just need a little sweet treat now.

Matt: Oh my goodness.

Lauren: It's really bad, but you know, it's fine. I think that the important thing to take away from all of this is that all of your metric tracking, all of the things that you're doing, that you're keeping track of, that you're looking at, it's all working towards a goal. Everything that you're doing is connecting to each other. Your social media metrics are hopefully helping you figure out how to drive more people to your website and your email newsletter. Your email newsletter metrics are hopefully helping you drive more people to your website. And your website is telling you how successful you are at getting people from those different places to your website and then getting them to convert to whatever it is you want them to do. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Which in theory is book sales or maybe it's sign up for your online course -

Matt: Well it could be a lot of things.

Lauren: - or hire you as an editor or yeah, it's a lot of things. There's plenty of things, whatever it is. 

[38:04] - Customer Data

Matt: And that's what we're going to get to here in just a second. The reason why all of that flow is important and ultimately getting people to your site to buy something from you - again, usually a book - is because now once they do that, and we're at the last bucket of data here, you now have customer data. And with that customer data, you basically are sitting on a gold mine. 

What a lot of these businesses got right and continue to get right, like Amazon and some of the others, is they don't care what product attracts you to their site. It doesn't matter. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: What they care about is that a transaction takes place. Because once that transaction takes place, they have a bunch of very valuable customer data from you. And from there, they can use it for remarketing purposes. And they do. And everybody has been remarketed to from Amazon and lots of other retailers as well. So customer data is ultimately what you're after. A book sale on your site results in customer data. It's the only place you're going to get customer data for the most part. 

You're not going to get customer data from Amazon, when you sell on Amazon. You're not going to get it from some of the other retail sites you might sell on. You'll get very high level transactional data. You'll know how many sales you made, and for how much and they might give you like, oh, the majority of your sales came from this region of the world and that's really it. They're not going to give you the most important stuff, which is the email address of your buyer, maybe a few other identifying pieces of information in terms of demographics and stuff and that's what you would be using to remarket. Customer data is ultimately what you're after - that behavior, what they did on your site, what they bought. This is great for when you launch your next book or an online course associated with the first book that you launched. 

Because now instead of going out to just social media, which is typically your only primary way to talk about a new release, you actually have a whole subset of people who have already bought things from you. You have their email addresses. You can email them directly and say, hey, my new book is dropping next week exclusively for people who buy direct from me. You'll have first crack at it. It won't be up on Amazon for two weeks after that. 

So you've got incentive now to get people back to purchase again. You have a built-in audience of buyers that you have access to directly, and you don't have to just kind of shout out into the void and hope people come and buy from you. That's what's so important about customer data and remarketing. 

Lauren: Yes, it's also where we've talked about in the past, these third party retailers like Amazon do not have any motivation for people to buy your product. So like, if you've done the work if you're doing all this correctly and you're doing the social work and you're doing the email work and you're doing the things that you need to do to get people interested in you and then to your Amazon book page. 

Amazon has no motivation to then encourage them to buy that product from you. You are on Amazon or your customers, rather, are on Amazon's page now, and there's nothing stopping them from deviating off into another path to go buy something else from Amazon. And Amazon's going to say, great, cool. We got what we wanted out of this. We got a customer to buy something from our website. We're making a profit off of it. And we don't care that we stole your customer away from you in this case. So the only way for you to actually guarantee the benefits of all the work that you put into getting people to click on the link to buy your book is to bring them to your page and not anybody else's. 

Matt: Yeah, 100%. I think we sort of underestimate the power of having that customer data too. I've talked to people before and they're like, well, yeah, but you know, on Amazon, I might sell ten books in a week. And if I just send people to my website, I might only sell five books in a week. I'll take that five over that ten all day long, because on those five books, not only am I going to make a much higher profit margin, but I'm also going to have that customer data. 

So instead of those ten books where I don't know who bought my book and I can never have a communication with them when my next book comes out or for an online course I want to sell for those five people, I do. And so those five become infinitely more valuable than those ten with a much higher profit margin attached. So again, when you start doing the math on these things and understanding how valuable that customer data is, that's when it'll really click for you and your business. I mean, if what we were saying was wrong, companies like Amazon wouldn't exist. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: These other companies wouldn't want your customer data. It is the most valuable thing to them because it allows them to continue selling to you and to continue marketing to you. So. That's the name of the game. That's the end goal for you to build a sustainable long term author book business.

Lauren: Or any kind of business. 

Matt: Yeah. Well, yeah, true. 

Lauren: Yeah. We're assuming that if you're listening to this, it's because you're building an author business. 

Matt: Yeah. I mean -

Lauren: But. 

Matt: That’s fair. 

Lauren: Yeah. So when we're talking about - I know we talked a little bit about this already - but when we're talking about customer data, like we're not just talking about the email remarketing. Like I know that's Matt, and I'm not trying to undermine the point Matt just made, cause that is actually a very important point, but we are also talking about other types of customer data too.

And that's going to include things like your customer demographics. Not just the email information for who's buying from you, but who are the actual people buying from you? Do you have a target audience in mind? And does the target audience that you have in your head match the actual audience of people buying your books? 

That's going to help you figure out who you're marketing to in the future. Are you marketing to the correct audience? Is your reader persona actually accurate for the people that you - that you see actually buying your books? Those are all things that you want to know when you're figuring out your future marketing plans and even like your future writing plans. You know, if it turns out that you've got an audience that you didn't expect, or maybe you've got a really big fan base in one random city somewhere or something like that, like that's all information that can only help you -

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: - to have access to that. So that's something that's really important to have. There's also, you know, you're going to want to see like, your customer behavior. You're going to want to see of those people, of that audience of people that are coming to your website. Do you see that there is a consistent amount of traffic to one page more than every other page no matter what you're sending people to? Do you have one book that is selling way more copies? 

Or do you have maybe you see that you have, you know, you're getting an equal amount of traffic pretty much on all five of your books, but one of them is consistently outselling the rest of them. What is it that makes that one different? 

Matt: Well, and by the way, just to reiterate, one of the things that are really helpful here is that this website data is not only about which products sell the best, but you'll be able to see of all the people that bought, let's say a particular book, what percentage of those people came to your website from social media? What percentage of those people came to your website from email? What percentage came to your website from a Google search? And so it also helps you understand where your marketing dollars and or time is best spent. And again, which books, which products are resonating with which audiences the source of that traffic. Product to audience relevancy is really important. 

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, if you see that 75% of your website referrals are coming from your email newsletter, maybe spend some more time on that email newsletter, maybe spend some less time on social media. Unless, of course, you are discovering that your email subscribers are coming from social media. That's why we say all these metrics are connected to each other. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And you have to kind of be paying attention to how they impact each other and this whole flow. These aren't siloed metrics that you're looking at on these different platforms. They all connect with each other. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: Which is why, like Matt said earlier, I am a spreadsheet queen. I always encourage people - 

Matt: You’re a queen, I don’t know…

Lauren: - even if you're looking at your like - even if you're just looking at your like high, high, high level metrics, you want to just have like a summary of them. I would always encourage you to - whether it's Google Sheets or some other version, whatever it is, pick somewhere that you can regurgitate all this information for yourself in just like a clear and easy - okay, I didn’t like that word choice either. 

Matt: Regurgitate? 

Lauren: I don't know. Pick somewhere where you can have just like, a summary of all this information for yourself in a quick shot that you can look at so you can see trends over time. You can see like maybe noticing like how things are connected over time and stuff like.

Matt: Just don't regurgitate on it. What do your bracelets say today? 

Lauren: What do my bracelets say today? One of them says old habits die screaming. One of them says oh no, which I realized at lunch I had put on upside down, so it said on ho. And the other one says Kintsugi kid. 

Matt: What? 

Lauren: Kintsugi kid? 

Matt: What is that? 

Lauren: So it's the name of a Fall Out Boy song - 

Matt: Oh my god. 

Lauren: But Kintsugi, no, no, no, this is actually really cool. Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with like gold filigreed stuff so that you can see where it was broken and where it was repaired. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Yeah. And also I've noticed halfway through this recording that you're wearing a sweatshirt that says books and mine, my shirt says, I love you, it's ruining my life, which I feel like is actually very - like, I think that's a complete sentence that's very representative for me. 

Matt: Ah, I see. Okay. 

Lauren: So thanks. 

Matt: All right. 

Lauren: All right, yeah. 

Matt: Well, if you have any questions about data, how to use it, where to get it, what to do with it, email us podcast@lulu.com. We love talking data, obviously. 

Lauren: Yeah, this episode could have been twice as long. 

Matt: Easily. 

Lauren: Easily. 

Matt: And I actually thought it'd be a little bit shorter, but - 

Lauren: I don't know why you thought that.

Matt: I don't, I don't know. I say that every time. 

Lauren: That's very optimistic of you. 

Matt: Yeah, I don't know. I've got cookies to eat though. So we should wrap this up. 

Lauren: Yeah. Let's get out of here. You can always email us if you have any questions. Follow us on Lulu social media. Check us out on YouTube, we have video now podcast@Lulu.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. 

Matt: Later.