So What? Building Your Personal MarTech Stack, Part 2

All right, and welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show from Trust Insights. As always, I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. And in this week's episode, this live stream, we're going to continue to uh make it look like I have my act together through my personal brand. Um we're using my website and my assets as the example because it's pretty much a blank slate. And so last week we covered going through setting up a basic website uh with some of the basic, you know, contact forms and tracking through Google Analytics.

Um and this week we're gonna continue that process. So we're gonna fix up a couple of things that were left over and we're gonna start to move into a basic email newsletter and what all of that looks like. So Chris, it's all you all right. Let's have some fun. Now one of the things we ran into last week was the fact that your website was running on a very, very old version of PHP.

The good news is that for a lot of us, if you are hosting with a a even moderately reputable company, uh there's usually a control panel of some kind where you can change the versions of these things and get your side up to date. Here's the catch. A lot of companies will not make the migration for you automatically because uh some versions of PHP will actually break stuff. Uh we were uh on um our the marketing over coffee website and actually the Trust Insights website as well. We switched up to um to uh PHP 7.3 and it and then all of our redirects stopped working.

Like, oh, that's awkward. And it turns out that there was some other things that they were doing um confluent with that. So uh short of it is you will have to force the change yourself, and then you have to immediately go in and make sure nothing is broken. So last week, one of the things we talked about was setting up Motomo. Uh Motomo is an alternative to Google Analytics, and it the it's available as a standalone open source package.

If you want to run it on your own server, you certainly can. But one of the things that they did was they uh created a WordPress version of it. Now we'll see if we can uh this week get it installed. Last week we got the warning about PHP 5. Chris, why don't people use Motomo exclusively instead of Google Analytics?

Well, I that's a really good question. There's a couple of reasons I think people might not use it. One, they don't know it exists, right? Um, which is probably the largest reason. Uh, and two, um, up until now, it was one of those things that had a fairly high technical bar uh of entry.

Uh now with it being essentially just one big honk and WordPress plugin, it's no more difficult to use than standard WordPress. It is also another thing to admin, right? So if you've if you've gone in and set up your Google Analytics and such. With Motomo, you now have to essentially reset it up to work to track the same things that you were tracking in Google Analytics. It's got its own tracking snippets, it's got its own uh actually you has its own tag manager uh if you wanted to use theirs versus Google's.

And the use case that we recommend for people with Matomo is you install it when you want a backup, right? If you have a mission critical website and you want a backup source of analytics uh in case I don't know, Mountain View falls off into the Pacific Ocean one day. Um this is a good thing to have. Should it be your primary analytics system? Probably not.

Um, it's not as robust, it's not as thorough. Um, it doesn't have any of the machine learning features that are built into Google Analytics. It doesn't have uh quite a sophisticated tracking model, but it's not bad. And if it's for um a website like yours, Katie, which is a personal website, personal brand, it's actually good enough. Um if it's it if you're doing like bigger stuff, like more sophisticated tracking, yeah, that's where it really falls down.

Okay. So like if I start selling e-commerce or something through my website and I want to track it, I should probably look at having a system like Google Analytics that is a more sophisticated and can do some of that attribution modeling. Exactly. Uh or even just the plugin installs properly, which is as we can see here, um, it completely your website actually managed to time out. So I think this is uh a point at which we would say, you know what, it's probably time for you to change website hosts.

Uh we're not gonna do that on this show because that's a really large project. But this is now you get what you pay for, right? When it comes to website hosting. There's there's just no way to nice way of putting it, and you're on a uh a not as robust plan from uh a different vendor. So we'll we'll move you over to a new site.

However, that does not stop us from taking additional thing uh steps to to get things rolling. One of the things we want to do is set up Search Console. Do you were you gonna say something, Katie? Nope. Okay.

Probably, but no. Okay. So setting up Google Search Console. The recommended way to set up Google Search Console is at the domain level and using your DNS. Now again, we're dealing with a kind of not robust website host that actually obscures your DNS.

Um and you can't go edit it uh without like opening a customer support ticket. So we're gonna actually have to use the old-fashioned uh way of adding a property. So let's go ahead and go to and do the URL version of the website instead. You would use domain because ideally because domain gives you way more data and information. It gives you access to all the different variations.

Like if you've got subdomains, like you know, uh, for example, we have marketing.trust insights.ai. That's uh a subdomain, and we search console doesn't automatically track subdomains. Okay, we have three options here. We have tag, we have Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager account. Let's go with let's keep it simple.

Let's just use your Google Analytics account. And actually, nope, can't do that because you don't use that. You gotta use your tag manager account. The reason why I couldn't use Google Analytics is you don't have the uh analytics.js snippet on your site. You don't have to.

So I was gonna ask you about that because when I was getting everything set up, I kept getting these error messages. And I'm glad we're going through this because I felt like a big bag of fail when I couldn't figure out something like Search Console. Trademark, big bag of fail. There you go. Um so what's happening here is that because we're using a uh uh plugin for Google Tag Manager, uh, it's gonna format the GTM code slightly differently than if you were to copy and paste it right out of Google Tag Manager.

So in this case, we may need, let's see, what's gonna be the easiest way to do this? You know, probably the easiest way to do this is gonna be to just do it by the file-based method, which is suboptimal, but it's also foolproof. So let's go ahead and upload that that control file I just downloaded from this site and put it here. Okay, so we've uploaded that, and now let's verify it. Your verifier file is not found in the required location.

Let's see if it's actually there or not. Our file name is uh the file's there. Uh the problem is that we have, and this is again another website thing. It your website is not treating www and non-ww the same way. So how do you fix that?

We have to remove the property and we have to add the property without it. Oh my goodness. This is like when you buy the car from the sketchy guy down the street, and like every week you're finding another thing that doesn't work right. Exactly. Um, again, a lot of people, it's one of the funny things marketing technology is IT.

At the end of the day, it is IT. And one of the things that's challenging for a lot of marketers is that they're not used to do it to dealing with IT, right? It's not it is its own professional field. And even though marketing technology sounds cool, it's still IT. You're still messing with servers, you're still trying to make things work.

And as you can see here, there's all sorts of things that are gotchas. And this is where having actual IT people helps. Because if you're not a technologist, when you run into these errors, you're like, now what do I do? And I think that that's a very common scenario. Um, because you know, you kept getting that error message that you couldn't verify the property.

And, you know, I certainly didn't know that I would have to take out the WWW in Search Console. Like that seems like, oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense. But how does one even go about figuring that out? And I so I think you're absolutely right, Chris, that it's the IT part of marketing technology that tends to get glossed over. Yep.

Now we've got Search Console set up, but there's a critically important piece missing. We need to go back and link it in our Google Analytics account. If we don't do that, um, we run the risk of not getting data where we want it to be. Um, one of the critical things with Google Analytics is that if you don't link it up, um save association, then a lot of things like the queries, the um the pages and stuff in Google Analytics itself are populated by Google's built-in search data, which is terrible. It's like 90% useless garbage.

So never do that. Always link up your Search Console property. So now in your Google Analytics, with that linked up properly, uh, the Search Console stuff will function correctly. Okay. And this will tell me what keywords people are looking for that bring them to my site.

Exactly. So actually let's take a look at that. Let's go dive in. We've got 11 clicks, which is not a lot, but it's fine. It's you know, it's more than I had a week ago.

Exactly. So let's go ahead and just to turn on all of our metrics, looking at three months' worth of data here. And we have your name, which is good. Um the company name, okay, podcast. Um, so there's there's uh an entertaining uh mixed bag.

The one that we want to pay attention to is obviously this first one here, where you're ranking number three for your own name. Um what we should do to improve that is over time um get more links to your site for your name. Uh and easy ways to do that, for example, would be um if you go to if you have a network of sites that you can rely on, uh you can cross-link uh your content as it's created. So what this is uh one of those interesting little things that we do uh on trust insights in our our network of sites, we have recent posts, and these are brought in from the different RSS feeds. So if you then go over to uh marketing over coffee, you will then see the recent uh episodes there.

You'll see my website, and you'll see trust insights. So it creates this network, this mesh of different links. And obviously, now that your website is is up and running, we're gonna want to add this and create uh, you know, add one more site to the network. It's gosh, for those people who are really old and have a lot of gray hair like me. Um back in the 90s, there was this these things called web rings, and it was basically just uh you know a network of links of people linking to each other's sites, so you can jump into you know this community and see all these different sites.

This is exactly the same thing, except it's been updated slightly for you know this century. But the concept is a really strong one, and it works. It works really well for making sure that your site gets um gets visibility and you're constantly building links to other relevant sites because they're all your site in in a lot of ways. Okay. So we have we've now ascertained that you're you've got stuff there.

Um, and we know generally what you are and are not being found for. The pages part's not super helpful because obviously um there's not that many pages yet, but we'll get we'll we'll get you a blog going here soon. Those are literally all the pages on the website. Um let's take a look at the site map. Um, there is no site map yet, but uh in our SEO tools that we installed last week, uh the Yoast tool actually creates its own site map.

If I could just remember where the URL is, so I can plug it in. Is the lack of a site map in Search Console one of the reasons why I am showing up number three for my own name? Um no, it's because the the golden uh standard still is inbound links, and right now you just don't have hardly any. So getting more of those links to you is is gonna be of benefit to you. Okay.

Well, you know what? Let's just let's just and obviously one of the things on our to-do list is an install certificate. Yep. Okay, so there's your site map that's automatically generated from Yoast. Uh inside Search Console, we want to add this in.

We want to add in your site map so that it is indexed. Uh and when you make updates to your website, um, it will automatically register them. We'll have to give that at least a day. Okay. Other things we can check.

Okay, there won't be enough data for this yet. And your theme, well, you don't have any current errors, so your your site still looks good on those fronts. Let's check for any yep. And for the lack of data for the core web vitals, for those of you who may have missed it, we actually did do an episode dedicated specifically to core web vitals a couple of weeks ago. So you can find that on our so what playlist on our YouTube channel.

Yep. Okay. So Search Console is all set up. Now this gives you effectively the basics of a website. But one of the things that you probably should consider doing is having some way for you to reach out to people, not just waiting for people to come to you.

And the easiest way to do that is actually through email. So what we're gonna have you do is we're gonna uh install a newsletter service. Um there are many, many out there. Um this is one that a lot of folks who uh have been um doing a lot of stuff with uh in very successful called substack it's free um i believe it's free up to a certain number of subscribers um and then there's you can do a premium model where you charge people to subscribe to your email and then obviously the vendor gets a cut of it as well so let's go ahead and get you started with this I'm gonna skip your Twitter stuff right now and we'll use your trust insights uh email add us we'll blindly accept the agreement that we probably should read and for your bio we're just going to uh blatantly steal straight out of your Twitter bio and set a photo and again let's just borrow straight from Twitter and continue okay what do you want to call your newsletter Katie I mean for now Katie's newsletter for the sake of uh this episode so you don't have to watch us fumbling through terrible suggestions okay but uh folks who are watching if you have uh a suggestion for a newsletter name, toss it in the comments just for fun uh yes, please. Now, um, let me ask you this question, Chris.

You know, when you are setting up in Substack, if I call it today, Katie's new newsletter, but decide that someone had a really good suggestion. Can I change it down the line? Absolutely. You absolutely can. The only thing that you really can't change is the URL itself, the subdomain.

Got it. Okay. What's your newsletter about? Um podcasts and dogs and marketing. Okay, great.

Let's hit continue. Uh we don't have a mailing list to import. Oh. Okay. So now you've got your sign up page here, the coming soon page.

Let's go to your dashboard. And this is where you you would write your newsletter. Before we go any further, one of the things that Substack does allow you to do that I think is super helpful is it allows you to tie in your Google Analytics account. Um see if we can find that here. Community advertising.

Okay, so Google Analytics, we're gonna put in your tracking ID for your site. Should be gosh, I can't read that that closely. Let's do bring it to the other screen. UA 12705. Okay.

Now, what this is gonna do is anybody who visits your newsletter pages on the web uh now is going to see um you're gonna see in your own Google Analytics account uh that um those those pages visits as though it was your website, which is really helpful. This does not work with Google Analytics 4, it only works with classic Google Analytics. So, as we were talking about last week, there's no rush to switch over entirely and only to GA4 because there's a lot of legacy stuff that isn't gonna work with it. Well, and do you think that down the line as GA4 gets rolled out and more people start using it, then they'll start to incorporate some of these things? Yes.

I think you know that will eventually uh be the case. Okay, so your settings look like they're all good. What is that danger zone at the bottom? Oh, the danger zones that allows you to delete your publication. Oh, you get yeah, you get subscribers, you get some basic stats, you get your basic posts in here, things like that.

It's nice, it's it's pretty decent. What we're gonna do is the the home page to the site has um you know the the the we'll have the sign-up form and things like that. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna just take the home page itself and we're gonna put that on your website. There's no way that I know of right now to easily embed it in your site. So we'll just have to go um and let's just double check it.

Yeah. It's just the link itself. So let's go back to your site. And where should we put this? Um let's make it a menu item.

Okay. I was gonna say either let's make a newsletter page or a con or put it on the contact page. Yeah, you know what? Let's do the contact page. Let's keep it simple.

Okay. Once for this, you know, amazing newsletter that I have not yet thought about. How frequently are you gonna send your newsletter, Katie? Oh, the pressure is up to the case. Daily, definitely.

Let's say once a month. Okay, so I have my monthly newsletter for updates about podcasting, dogs, and marketing. I'll link that up. And update. Great.

You're you're ready to go, right? I'm guessing no. Uh no. We've forgotten a critical important thing, which is that should be a goal, right? We want people to do that thing.

It's you know, and it's funny that like we're joking about this because it seems like, oh yeah, duh, but I think that these are the very common traps that we all find ourselves in. Is we do we do the setup once, we're like, okay, we have things, but then we start adding on to it and forget to go back to the initial infrastructure, and then six months down the line, say, how come I don't have any of this information? Exactly. So here's the catch. This goes somewhere else.

This does not live on your website. And even though it goes to Google Analytics uh uh account, because your analytics account is set not set up for multiple domains, it's gonna it would look functionally the same as your home page. So what we want you to do is instead treat this as an event in tag manager. So let's go ahead and create a trigger. And we're gonna call this newsletter sign up.

And we're gonna trigger on clicks on links, I'm gonna trigger on some links, and we're gonna be looking at the click URL contains KaterRebera.substack.com. So anytime somebody clicks on that link, um, this trigger will fire. And now we need to create a goal for that. It's my universal analytics goal. This is going to be an event.

It's gonna be the category of newsletter. Action of subscribe. And we're gonna set this to your GA account based on your newsletter signup goal here and save that. And of course the last part is we have to go and actually set up the goal itself new goal. It's gonna be an event butter subscribe save.

Okay. So now you should probably hit submit and publish this tag manage container. Now are we done I'm gonna go ahead and guess no. You're correct. We're still done anybody saying why why are we still not done?

Well one of the things we talked about last week and we did last week was we set up Google Analytics for remember that Google Analytics for all goals are now managed inside tag manager. So if you've got it set up and you're in there anyway and you're building tags uh for your classic Google Analytics anyway, also take the time to build the Google Analytics 4 tag. You may as well, you're here anyways. Let's go ahead and set up our GA4. I strongly strongly encourage you to come up with some kind of common nomenclature for your goals that you can keep them separate and you know which ones are go to which instance.

And you're giving a very very straightforward nomenclature of GA4. So calling your GA4 goals starting with the prefix of GA4 makes a lot of sense. Yep. All right. Here's the nice thing.

If you're doing your stuff in Tag Manager anyway, you can reuse the same trigger for both classic and GA4. All right. So now we've got our event name declared there. Hit save and submit it. And now we go back to Google Analytics.

Now we have to switch to GA4 to declare that as a as an event inside here. New conversion event. This, by the way, is again where having common nomenclature for like your goals and things that makes sense is super important because you have to remember remind remember from application to application what things are. So now, any time that GA4 receives that newsletter subscribe call from tag manager, it's going to treat that as a conversion. So now we are finally done.

I don't know. I feel like I don't believe you, but okay. By the way, if you're going to be using GA4, you're going to be doing double the work for a period of time until uh until things get caught up. Um, but we're now in a position where we can start to uh to track and report on this stuff. Um question um is Google Analytics the best way to report on this stuff?

Like Katie, when you want to see how your website is doing, how are you gonna how are you gonna check in on it? You know, for a long time, Google Analytics was the best way to check in on this stuff. But if you're looking for multiple data points, then it can get a little bit overwhelming. Um, so you're clicking around and messing around with controls and filters, you know, it probably makes sense to have some kind of a dashboard, uh, is I'm guessing the answer that you're looking for. No, I actually legitimately see how you do stuff because I know how I do things, I just pull stuff out of an API and no, and nobody else does that.

I'm a big fan of automated dashboards where you take the time to set it up and then it just runs on its own, and then you can check in once a day, once a week, once an hour, however, you know, active you are with it. So I'm a big fan of Google Data Studio. I have found it to be uh life-changing since they rolled it out because the data automatically updates. Um coming from a healthcare background where near real time put in big heavy quotation marks meant, you know, at least a 30-day leg or sometimes a two-year leg in healthcare data, having actual true real-time data is something that I thought was just a fantastics uh invention. So I'm a big fan of Google Data Studios.

So what I would probably do for myself is I would set up a Google Data Studio dashboard and include each of the individual goals just so I could sort of see at a glance um how many people are doing any of the following goals at any given time for the time frame. And then I would probably take a look at things like where are people coming from, and then what queries are people using to find my site so that I can create more content around those things. So those would be the things that I would be looking for, given the simplicity of my website. I totally agree. The one other thing that you that you might want to think of for the website itself would be, and this would really with your personal brand, you got to build the audience first.

And then once you have the audience, you can start you know trying to convert them and monetize them and stuff. And so one of the things that you might want to think about down the road would be a CRM. Um, something like you know, for example, HubSpot. The free version of HubSpot has uh good enough CRM, certainly uh for for the low, low cost of zero, that allows you to ingest stuff like contact form data and store it and to be able to track things. So, like if you wanted to book, you know, manage speaking engagements, for example, that'd be a good system for doing that, particularly if you have you know anyone helping out with like you know outreach and things like that.

Um I think actually, why don't we save Google Data Studio? So the week of November 5th for for so what um uh there's uh a bunch of conferences that I think I have to be doing stuff at. So maybe uh that week that you can demonstrate to folks how you are want to build your own dashboard to monitor all this stuff. Um I want to uh finish up with here is we don't really have a good system right now for uh for keeping an eye on what people are saying about you for good or ill, right? Uh and so the the system I think that makes the most sense for where you are right now uh would be TalkWalker's free alerts service.

So let's go over to alerts. And let's create an alert about Katie Robert. And let's do it as it happens, only the best results and create an alert. This is more of assuming that you want to know what people are saying about you. You know, I think it's not a bad thing to have uh available to you.

Okay. So Katie, you'll get that email and then you just have to confirm, and then as people mention you, it's going to either send you an email or there's a way to subscribe to it in a blog reader like Feedly, for example, that allows you to have it all in one place. And that will obviously cut down on the amount of uh junk mail you get on a regular basis if you if that was uh of interest. Um the way you do that is each one has its own uh RSS feed. Um so I'll just show you an example.

This one uh I have here monitoring for uh let's see what do we got here. This is oh that looks like junk. Oh, that's social bakers. So social bakers uh website. Here's a feed for Katie.

So these are Katie, these are a bunch of Twitter mentions about you. Um we have uh marketing over coffee, and we have trust insights. Now, one of the really nice things about doing it inside of a blog reader, A, you didn't get 221 emails, right? Nobody really nobody really wants that much email. But B, once you're done with them, you just hit Marcus Reddit and you clear it off.

So that is the monitoring system that I think is should if you're we're building a personal brand. It's one of those things that is helpful to have. Could you bring this into Google Data Studio? Yes, with a lot of work. There are ways to connect it.

Uh it's not pretty. I would or not recommend it trying to shoehorn it in altogether. I would imagine that the easiest quote unquote, the easiest workaround for something like this would to bring those URLs into a Google Sheet and then hook up that Google Sheet into Data Studio. That to me would seem like the most straightforward way that doesn't involve any kind of custom code. Yep.

Agreed. I think that's probably the best way to do it. Um so we're at the end of section one of you just getting the basic Martex stack for for your brand. Uh what quite what folks questions do you folks have about building out all this stuff? Anyone?

Well, I guess in lieu of having a CRM set up, uh, so let's say for some magical mysterious reason, I suddenly get an influx of people, you know, uh subscribing to my newsletter or trying to contact me. Where does that data go? Where does that contact information go? How do I manage that? So right now that goes into Substack.

So Substack is where that lives where you go into your subscribers and see you know who has subscribed to your your newsletter, and then you can export uh some of this data as well if you wanted to. Again, later on, if you wanted something more sorry, go ahead. Uh later on, if you want something more sophisticated, that's where a system like HubSpot would come in handy. Now, what about people who use the contact form? You know, so on our website we have the contact form wired up to our CRM system.

But since for my personal website I don't have a CRM system, where does that data go aside from my email inbox? Currently it only goes to your email inbox. As literally I believe the only place it goes. Let me just double check that because some plugins do store the data locally which comes with its own uh risks and challenges as well. So meaning I would theoretically be able to go into the admin section of my WordPress site and export that data from the form.

In theory. If if we could get your freaking website to work at all. I mean it's a good thing it's not that important to me right now. And someday it might be but as of this moment I think it's a really good example of a very basic straightforward website that someone just needs to stand up in order to demonstrate that they are a real person. Yep.

Which is half the battle on the internet. So the answer to that question is it does not store um that information on your website so if you don't get the email you don't get the email it's just gone. I would actually say like if if this was going to be something you're going to invest some time in and you expected to get uh some growth out of uh look at a plugin like Gravity Forms or something that will cache the data locally so that um it's stored so that if something happens or your emails from your website, all get moved to your spam folder or something, you've got a backup copy somewhere. I mean, we even do that with our website. Uh with even with a CRM, we maintain uh uh a secured backup copy locally in case something happens.

Mm-hmm. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm guessing that that might be, you know, if I were setting this up myself, that would probably be a mistake that I would make without realizing that I'm not capturing that data anywhere. And one could argue that people contacting you through your website is some of the most important data that you could be collecting. Exactly.

So choose your technology well. What about you, John? Any questions, any observations? No, it's solid. You know, it's funny, we just hit all the classic roadblocks, you know, you run into as you're trying to string this stuff together.

It's always, you know, you think it's going to be so straightforward, and there's always uh another gotcha that you have to run off in Google to get it done. Exactly. Okay, folks. So the next in the next uh couple episodes, we're gonna be looking at um some additional monitoring and things like that, and some content curation things, and of course, how to set up that uh data studio dashboard. So if you're not already uh subscribe to our YouTube channel and stuff, be sure that you are, and uh a bunch of other things.

Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at Trustinsights.ai slash TI podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time