Google Analytics for Jewelry Brands
In episode #125 of the Joy Joya Jewelry Marketing Podcast, I share some of my favorite metrics for jewelry brands to track in Google Analytics and walk you through how you can easily monitor them on a regular basis. If you feel baffled by Google Analytics, then you’ll definitely want to listen to this episode. The transcript is below.
6:44 I really want to show you guys some of my favorite metrics to track in Google Analytics. I find that a lot of my clients are afraid of Google Analytics. And hey, I get it. I’ve been using Google Analytics for more than a decade. And I feel like I have not even scratched the surface of what’s possible with it. It is a super powerful tool. And it’s amazing to me that it’s free because it really serves as one of the most powerful tools in any marketing strategy that I’m working on with a jewelry brand. There’s so much information here. If you don’t already have Google Analytics connected to your website, then you are missing out on just a goldmine of data. So before you listen any further, go make sure Google Analytics is connected.
7:34 Once it’s connected, come listen to this episode. So what I have here on my screen, if you’re watching the video of this, if you’re listening to the audio, I’m gonna do my best to just explain everything. So Google actually has a demo store that if you want to kind of play around and experiment, you can look at the Google merchandise store and check it out so that you can see all the different tools in there. The first thing I usually like to do when I’m in Google Analytics, it’s when you’re logged in, in the top right hand corner of your dashboard, there’s a way to adjust the date. So depending on the type of data I’m trying to get, whether it’s more a long term view or a short term view, I always make sure that it is adjusted to show me what I’m looking at.
8:24 If I’m kind of diving into a jewelry brands data for the first time that I usually want to look at maybe a year’s worth of data. So I’m just gonna adjust that here For the sake of this example, we’re going to look at data back from April 2020 to April 2021. And that really kind of gives you a long overview of what’s been happening with your website or e commerce store so that you can really get a sense, you can also compare data. One thing I sometimes like to do, if I want to show growth or percentage change, I will choose a date range and then click, you have the option to compare it to a previous period. So if I want to, for example, see how the past year compared to the year before it, I can do that. And it will show me at least in the example here that there was a little bit of growth. Hopefully for your jewelry brand, there was a lot of growth. But that’s something that you can within seconds see on Google Analytics, rather than guessing about whether or not your jewelry brand is growing, at least in terms of your web presence, digital presence, you can very easily see that in Google Analytics.
9:43 So when you are on the master dashboard of your Google Analytics, the first thing that will pop up is audience overview. If you’re not watching this video, it’s on the left hand side there’s a menu you expand that audience section and then you can get an overview which again, depending on the date range that you chose, it’ll show any number of months on the main screen. So the top kind of shows you fluctuation. I guess this is a line graph. I don’t remember from statistics, my graph names. I know what a pie chart is, what a bar graph is, I guess this is a line chart, shows how ignorant I am about statistics. But I do know what I’m talking about in Google Analytics. You can see things like total number of users, new users, sessions, number of sessions per users, per user page, view pages per session, average session duration and bounce rate, I’m going to quickly explain what all of those things mean. Because they are all really important, especially when you’re trying to get an overview of your website traffic.
10:56 So users is kind of self-explanatory. That refers to the number of people, I’m assuming its people, it might be dogs or cats, if they can use the computer but people who visited your website, over whatever given period you’re looking at, whether that’s a week, a month, a year or more. New users is simply how many of those people who visited your website are coming for the first time, that’s a really important metric to look at, if you’re interested in customer acquisition, if you want to make sure that your brand is getting in front of new customers, rather than people who already know you. So that’s something that you would pay attention to, if that’s a concern of yours, Sessions does not refer to unique people, but rather, how many times in total was your site visited? So that could be by the same person multiple times. And it usually is, and that’s why the sessions number is typically much higher than the user’s number. Number of sessions per user means how many times on average did each person come to your site? If you’re really interested in, having people be returned visitors to your website, making sure that your website and your brand is interesting enough for people to come back, then that’s a metric that you’ll definitely want to track.
12:24 Page views means in total, how many pages are people looking at when they come to your site. Google Analytics here is saying that repeated views of a single page are also counted. And then pages per session is an important number, if you want to make sure that your website that your products are engaging. So the obviously the more pages someone is visiting, when they come to your website, the more interested they are in exploring other things. If this is a really low number, it probably means that they’re just coming and going without really exploring or spending time on the site. And average session duration kind of works together with that to give you an idea of how engaging your website and your products are, the higher the time that someone’s spending on your site, the more that that’s a sign that you have something to offer, at least to the people who are ending up on your website. So getting that number higher, is always good.
13:29 Bounce rate is something that really confuses people that I work with. So Google defines bounce rate as a percentage of single page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. So basically, someone goes to your website, they’re on a page for less than a second, they don’t click anywhere, they don’t interact with the page, they kind of immediately leave or bounce, as they say, get ready to bounce. So the higher that number is, the worse off you’re going to be. You’ll typically see if you’re advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Google ads, that at least for the traffic that’s coming from ads, that bounce rate is going to be higher, probably in the 70% or above. Because it’s hard to, even with the best targeting really qualify that traffic. People coming from ads, it’s a little bit of a gamble. You don’t know if they’re qualified traffic, some of it will be, some of it won’t be. Bounce rate, apart from ads, typically what I see is around 30 to 50%. I would say that’s pretty normal. And then again, with the ads, it can get up to seven year even 80%. It’s just a normal thing. It’s something I see all the time. So just to give you some benchmarks to look at.
14:55 So this audience overview is typically the first thing I used just to get a feel for what’s going on a feel for the traffic. Another thing that I like to look at under that same audience menu item on the left hand side is demographics. Now, this is something that you actually have to enable when you implement Google Analytics. And one really common mistake that I see is a jewelry brand will have Google Analytics for years but they never went in enabled the demographics report. And the reason it needs to be enabled is I think, for data privacy concerns. So you have to take that extra step to just agree to how that data is being used. But once you unlock that report and I suggest if you are not sure if you’ve done this, to go check right now, because it won’t show you historic data. So if you enable this today, for example, it’s not going to show you the demographic information from like a year ago. So the sooner that you get this going, the sooner you can benefit from this data.
16:06 Demographics overview shows you general age ranges of the people visiting your site, which is going to be super helpful in developing customer personas, for example. So in this example, store, the bar chart says that the biggest segment of customers are between the ages of 25 and 34. And then it will also show you in a pie chart the breakdown between male and female visitors. And you can also look at things like where the visitors are located in the world. So even if they’re in the US, you can narrow it down to see what state these people are in? What city or metro area they’re in? All this information is super helpful in understanding who your customers are or at the very least who are the people visiting your website? And are they matching who you think your customers are or who your customers should be?
17:10 After that, I really like to go in the left hand menu to a menu item called acquisition and acquisition to the overview, acquisition just refers to how are you acquiring the traffic? So what method are people using to get to your site? The options are direct, which means someone is typing your URL into their browser and going directly to the site. Why is that important? Because it shows that those people already know you. So they’re likely return users or maybe they met you in person or somewhere else. And now they’re going to your website. Organic search means that they got to your site through a search engine like Google. Referral means that somebody got to your site by clicking from another website. So for example, if you had press somewhere and there was a link to your site, if they clicked your site, that’s a referral. Display and paid search referred to any sort of advertising that you’re doing people coming to your site through ads.
18:25 And then social is very, very common with jewelry brands. So what I like to do, especially because social is such a big form of customer acquisition for jewelry brands, when I’m on this page, I actually like to click on social. And then it will show you a breakdown of all the different social platforms and which ones are the most popular. This is a view in Google Analytics or a metric that I noticed almost all my clients never kind of break down, like maybe they see the overview of acquisition. But then they don’t look to see which are the social media platforms that are actually making up that overview. In the case of this example store or Google Analytics account, YouTube as the top refer Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, whatever, whatever, Instagram is not even on here. The typical breakdown that I see with jewelry brands is Facebook, Instagram, Instagram stories and Pinterest are typically in those top four. And then depending if it’s a brick and mortar or e commerce, sometimes I’ll see Yelp on there. Sometimes I’ll see YouTube on there. It really depends on the brand itself.
19:42 But this can help you really understand where the traffic is coming from in terms of social, where you need to kind of be investing more time and effort and where maybe you can pull back a little bit like if a social media platform really isn’t working for you, you’re not aren’t seeing any success or growth from it, maybe it’s time to kind of like step back from it. So not only do I want to see where users are coming from, but I also want to look at the bounce rate and the pages per session and the e commerce conversion rate for all of those social media platforms. Because let’s say Facebook is driving the most traffic from you but if it has a super high bounce rate, which means the people coming from Facebook are all like leaving immediately. That’s kind of adding another dimension to the picture. So you could be like, “Wow, Facebook is really working for me.”
20:44 But at the same time, it’s not working for you, because everyone coming from Facebook is bouncing, they’re leaving right away. So it’s important to kind of look beyond just the users and also kind of see these different facets of the data, are people coming to your site from Instagram and visiting multiple pages? Are they spending a lot of time on the site? Are they making purchases? What’s the e commerce conversion rate from any given social media platform? So you really have to take in this data holistically, instead of just focusing on like one part of it or one specific number.
21:25 Another thing I like to look at in Google Analytics and the left hand menu, there’s something called behavior. And that refers to the actions or the paths that users take when they’re on your site. So in the behavior overview, you’ll see a list of pages. And those show you the top page views. So, which pages are viewed the most often on your site? That’s what you’ll get in the overview. 99% of the time, that top page is going to be your homepage, that’s typically going to be the one that people view the most. If you go to behavior and then click site content and then click landing pages, that’s another metric I really like to look at. Landing page refers to the page that people find themselves on when they enter your site. So, you may be wondering, “Why would it be different from my homepage?” Well, if someone finds you through Google search, a different page on your website, like maybe a product page or a blog post, maybe ranking, so they enter your site through there. And this is a good way to also see like what is working for you in Google search. If you have a blog post, that’s ranking really high as a landing page. That means you should probably write more blog posts like that, because it’s helping you get ranked in Google search results. And it’s really bringing a lot of people to your site, probably for the first time. So it’s good to see the landing page for SEO purposes and just for your own knowledge, so you know what content to create in the future and what to optimize.
23:20 And then finally, I like to look at the conversions section of the menu. This requires a little bit of extra setting up for Shopify, for example, where you have to just make sure that, I believe it’s called enhanced e commerce tracking is enabled. But once you set it up, and you can do a Google search for the instructions to do that, it allows you to see in e commerce overview your customers’ path to purchase. So you can see their shopping behavior, their checkout behavior, these are all so important to optimizing your e commerce site. So it’ll kind of break it down for you. How many total sessions do you have? Then, how many sessions are people looking at products? From there, how many people are adding products to cart? From there, how many people are actually checking out and finishing the transaction? So where are people falling off in the process? Are they abandoning carts? How many people are new customers versus returning customers? These are all such a valuable insights that you can gain from Google Analytics.
Links mentioned at the beginning of this episode:
“Christie’s Jewels Up Lela Rose Bridal Gowns For New Sales Initiative“