59. Data Day

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Looking at your traffic numbers should be a recurring task for your business that you add to your schedule. Let's chat about why data day is such an important addition to your organic marketing calendar. Welcome back to the podcast. I can't believe that it's already August. When I was in the classroom, I always loved that fresh planner energy that came with a new school year.

[00:00:37] And honestly, who am I kidding? I still love it because as I am recording this episode, in fact, I am regularly checking my kids' school website for next year's calendar, so I can start getting those dates added to my planner. So this Fresh Planner energy is actually the inspiration behind our August episodes of Pay Less for Traffic.

[00:01:01] I wanted to chat about four important days that you should add to your calendar if you plan to focus on organic marketing with blogging and Pinterest. And let's just dive right in. The first day that we're going to add to our planner is data day. It might seem odd to start with looking at data because really that's typically something that you do after you have taken some sort of action.

[00:01:30] But looking at what's already working for your business and what's not will help the rest of your planning go so much more smoothly. So how often should you have a day where you dive into your numbers for your blog and your Pinterest account? Well, I do it once a month. I don't do it any more often than that because I would drive myself crazy, but I don't want it to go so long that, you know, I can't monitor and adjust. I wanna be able to notice things as they're happening and not two or three months down the line.

[00:02:05] But the frequency of when you decide to look at your numbers is totally up to you. I just think it's really important to go ahead and put that on your schedule. And so what do you look at on this day? I'm gonna go through three places that I think you really want to look through your data because yes, you could just go straight to Google Analytics and see a summary of everything, but really.

[00:02:30] It's good to make a couple of extra stops just for some slightly more specific information. And so my favorite place to start on data day is Google Search Console, and I will explain why I don't go straight to Google Analytics in a little bit. So the first thing I like to do in Search Console is make note of the performance graph.

[00:02:53] How many organic impressions are my posts getting in Google search, just overall, and then how many clicks? These numbers can provide some really helpful insight into just how Google feels about your website overall. Once I've kind of looked at that graph, I go to the table under the graph and I click on the pages tab.

[00:03:15] So this will show me the clicks and impressions for individual pages on my website. And then I like to sort this table by clicks so that I can see the top pages from my website for the past month. You'll notice that your top 10 posts will stay pretty consistent from month to month with seasonal posts getting occasional boosts.

[00:03:37] And this is why I don't feel the need to create a list, a spreadsheet of my top posts for that particular time. Instead, this for me is just kind of a quick scan to see if any of my old faithful posts have just dropped out of the top and where they went. Or I also just like to take a quick scan to see if any of my newer content has started to take off and to see where it is in relation to all of my other content.

[00:04:08] And so overall it's just good to look for any red flags of sudden traffic losses so that you can try to troubleshoot that. And then it's also helpful to see what's doing well so that you can do more of that. Another thing that I like to check out when I'm in Google Search console is the list of posts that have not been indexed.

[00:04:33] I just look for any glaring issues, especially if I've written a lot of fresh content. I wanna make sure that those are getting discovered, they're getting crawled, they're getting indexed. And if you're not sure what I'm talking about when it comes to this indexing report, be sure to go back to episode 55 where we talked about that in more detail.

[00:04:54] Now there's a lot more information that you can get from Google Search Console and you'll decide what information is important for you to track in your business. Sometimes I'll go down a rabbit hole of looking at the search queries that are bringing people to my website, but I actually work most of that into a different day that we're gonna talk about later this month.

[00:05:17] So for now, you're just kind of looking at the general numbers. Are they trending up? Are they trending down? You can compare them to previous periods, previous years to just kind of get an overall sense of how your website is performing in search. Okay, so that's Google Search Console. The next stop on data day for me is Pinterest.

[00:05:41] Now I received a great question from a listener, asking, you know, what should they be looking for in their analytics and what should they be doing with these numbers? And so to kind of touch on that question, I'm going to share what I do in Pinterest on data day. There are three numbers that I track on Pinterest and record every month.

[00:06:03] Now, I don't put too much stock into any one of these numbers individually. But together, these three numbers are like a temperature gauge for the health of my account. The first number I write down is how many followers I have. I don't really care too much about the cumulative number. Instead, I'm just kind of looking at the movement from month to month because it gives me more insight into how my pins are likely circulating on Pinterest.

[00:06:33] Because when pins are ranking well on search or in the home feeds of non followers, the follower count will organically increase. When pins aren't circulating as well, the follower count is a little more stagnant. I also had a month where all of my clients actually had declines in their followers, like across the board, all of my clients.

[00:06:55] And so to me that was a sign that Pinterest had done a big cleanup of spam accounts. And so it's interesting to take note of your followers mainly just to watch the natural progression and just to see if anything weird happens. And the other reason I like to write down the follower number is because I don't believe there's anywhere to really track your follower movement on Pinterest, like over time.

[00:07:23] And so it is interesting to just make note of that progress. So after I grab my follower count, I head over to my analytics and look at my impressions. Now, when you go into your analytics, you'll notice that your impressions default to all impressions, organic and paid. And so if you have ever run an ad campaign at any point and you're just interested in how your pins are performing organically,

[00:07:51] you're going to need to go in and indicate that you only want to see your organic impressions. Now, the reason I hesitate to put too much stock into this number on its own is that your impressions can easily be inflated just by your pinning activity. So I am way more impressed to see 1 million impressions on an account that just pins one fresh pin per day

[00:08:18] versus seeing 1 million impressions on an account that's pinning 50 fresh pins a day. So the main thing to watch for when you're writing down your number of impressions is you're looking for a huge decline in your numbers that doesn't match up with the season because we know, especially in the TPT space, that seasonal swings are very common.

[00:08:46] But if you suddenly have a huge decline in impressions that doesn't really fit the season, it could be a sign that something's not right and you need to contact Pinterest support because you could have inadvertently been just caught up in a spam filter. And so that's my main reason for documenting my impressions.

[00:09:08] Yes, it's exciting to see that my pins are circulating, and my impression number is getting higher the more I pin, that's a great temperature gauge. But overall for me, mostly it's just watching for red flags. And then that leads me to the final number that I write down from my Pinterest analytics, and that would be the outbound clicks.

[00:09:31] And again, I filter this just for organic, and this is such an important number because that's the whole point of using Pinterest is we want people to click out of Pinterest and onto our websites. And so it's really helpful to see from Pinterest's perspective how many clicks we're getting to our website because Google Analytics is kind of tricky to really nail down exactly how much traffic you're getting from Pinterest because it's just tracked in many different ways. And so you have a little bit of Pinterest traffic over here in social, you have some in referral, you have some in direct traffic. And so I just like how it's much tidier to look directly on Pinterest to see how many outbound clicks I'm getting. Then in addition to writing down these three numbers, I also just spend a little bit of time cruising through my top pins.

[00:10:25] I don't really record anything. I do pull that report, just so that I have that data, because like we've talked about in a previous episode, Pinterest does not hold that pin specific data for I think longer than six months, I believe. And so it's good to just grab a CSV of that if you'd like.

[00:10:46] But mainly I just like to look at my top pins to see, are my old faithfuls still there? Have they been replaced by something else? Are there any patterns that I'm seeing in the pin designs that are doing well that I can recreate later? There's just a lot that you can learn, honestly, just from browsing your top pins and spending a little bit of time in your analytics.

[00:11:11] And so once I have been able to get that specific information that I want from Google Search Console, and then from Pinterest, it's time to dive into Google Analytics. Now, I'm gonna tell you a little secret just between you and me, I actually don't spend a ton of time in Google Analytics. I get the information that I need from Google Search Console and Pinterest Analytics because I just feel like the information is more specific.

[00:11:37] It matches up mostly with what I care about right now in this season of my business and website. But I do know the value in looking at Google Analytics because it is the best way to get a feel for user behavior on your website. There's no better way to look at what people are doing when they come to your website.

[00:12:01] You're able to break things down and look at things like bounce rate and time spent on page and how many pages they went to each session. You're able to look at where your audience is located and it's just a lot of really helpful information.

[00:12:17] It honestly can become a little bit overwhelming, and so that's kind of why it's the third stop that I make on my data day, because really there's just one number that I'm interested in writing down. I know all of this data is there whenever I want it. I can go back and dive into things in more detail if I want to, but the one number that I write down

[00:12:41] on data day is just my number of sessions per month. And the reason I care about that one is that's just a really great summary of how many people are landing on my website according to Google, because I monetize my website through Journey by Mediavine, and I just like to make sure that my sessions are stable so that I can continue with my income through that source.

[00:13:08] And I also have the goal to monetize through just regular mediavine eventually. So I like to track my sessions as part of that progress. But then when I'm in there looking at my overall sessions, I am looking for anything that sticks out as different or unexpected. And if I do see something, I will dive in and look more closely.

[00:13:34] Let's say I had a huge spike. I wanna know why. So I look at my top posts and I get a feel for, you know, which post has taken off. Most of the time I would've noticed that in Google Search Console or Pinterest, like I probably already have an idea of where that came from, but sometimes it might be different. Maybe

[00:13:57] one of my posts got shared on Reddit or on Facebook, and I'll have a huge social media spike. And so it's good for me to look for anything that's out of the ordinary and then to figure out where it came from. Because again, if we see something that's working, we should do more of that. And then that was the other thing I wanted to mention is that Google Analytics will give you more information about those other traffic sources that you might be targeting for your business.

[00:14:26] So maybe you have done a campaign of really trying to share your blog posts in your email. You've probably used UTM codes so that you can look to see if those are successful. You can also go into your email provider and look at the stats of that email. So whatever you are doing in your business that's important to you in that season, that's what you would be looking at during data day.

[00:14:54] The other thing is if you have a Facebook community, or a Facebook page and you like to share your blog content to those sources, that's a great thing to also just check up on in Google Analytics. And so now that you've taken the time to just kind of get a feel for how your website is performing in organic search, on Pinterest, and through other sources that you wanna track in Google Analytics, it's time to zoom out a little bit and look at the big picture and make some decisions based on this data.

[00:15:28] And so that's what we're gonna be talking about next week is scheduling a big picture day. But for now, what I'd love for you to do is open that fresh planner of yours and jot down when your next data day is going to be. In my business, I like to look at my numbers on the first Monday of every month.

[00:15:49] It's a task that I know is coming every month and I don't forget to do it, and then I make sure I have those numbers because then that drives the rest of my decision making and all of these other days that we're going to put on our calendars. So I will see you next week when we talk about Big Picture day.