So What? Google Analytics Competitive Benchmarking

Well, hey friends, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live stream from Trust Insights. As always, I'm joined by Chris and John. Uh today we're talking about Google Analytics competitive benchmarking. And I really like this topic because one of the questions we get asked a lot is how do I compare myself against my competitors?

How do I know if the marketing that I'm doing is helping me get ahead in a competitive way? You know, how do I pull some sort of a competitive report? And what we're gonna go through and what we're gonna walk through is how to answer a lot of those questions all within your own Google Analytics account. Um, you know, so we talk about Google Analytics a lot on this show, but it really is the best foundational piece of your Martex stack in order to understand what's going on with you and your customers and also your competitors. So let's dive into the competitive piece.

Chris. All right. So uh this is specific to Google Analytics 3 or the uh universal analytics. This is not a feature that is available in Google Analytics 4. I sure hope that someday it is, because it is incredibly useful, but as of right now, it is a Google Analytics 3 thing only.

So uh if you want to follow along, that's great. Uh fire up your Google Analytics 3 account. And what you're gonna be looking for here is the left-hand side, go into the audience menu, scroll down until you get to benchmarking. You can open up that submenu, and you get three things channels, location, and devices. The one that's going to be the most useful for us is going to be channels.

And when I uh click on that and head into here, what we're gonna see is uh our website, and then we get to specify a an industry that is composed of an anonymous grouping, an anonymized grouping of similar size companies. So let's go ahead and um just start at the uh default business and industrial. This is what you'll see the first when you first sign in. And what you're looking at here is the industry, the country or region, and then the size by daily sessions and how many websites form this benchmark. In this case, it's 25,000.

And what you're looking at here is the the dark blue line is our company's website traffic for whatever this time period is. The lighter blue line is the benchmark, is the uh what this aggregate group of companies is. Now, what we want to do first things first, before we do anything else, is we want to get uh something as close to our company as possible. So inside of this menu, you can uh you know dig around and see what are the different types or categories of website. So we're gonna go into business and industrial.

Uh, we do a lot of stuff in uh in marketing and advertising. We're gonna tap into here, and then there's sub uh industries in here as well. So all advertising and marketing, which includes things like PR, telemarketing, sales, uh, direct and email. I'm gonna go with all advertising and marketing because we do a fair amount of that. What you'll see happen is the benchmark rearranges itself.

It tells you now there's only 1799 properties here, uh, as opposed to all. Now, if I I can choose uh geographic restriction, let's go with uh the United States, all regions, and what happens is as you get more and more specific, the benchmarks change with the caution that sometimes if there's not enough websites in that thing to make it anonymous, Google will say, Hey, we have no information. So in fact, let's let's dig in a bit more and see if we can do uh our state of uh Massachusetts. And this should give me an error. It should say, like, I don't have enough.

Well, actually, no, it doesn't. Um, let's go to 100 to 499. Yeah, so actually it in terms it turns out that there are just enough advertising and marketing companies in Massachusetts that we could look at similar size companies. So go ahead, Katie. I was gonna ask Chris.

So the way in which uh Google gets this information is how you set up your Google Analytics account uh in your settings. And so I believe, Chris, uh correct me if I'm wrong, benchmarking is one of those toggles in your admin that you actually have to turn on. And you also, when you're setting up your Google Analytics account, have to specify your general industry. And I think we specified advertising and marketing, but that's how Google is saying, okay, let me pull anonymously all of the Google Analytics accounts that have specified themselves as analytics uh advertising and marketing in Massachusetts, and then the session data is what the session data is. Is that correct?

Exactly right, exactly right. It's all averaged together. Um there's 495 companies of similar uh size uh in Massachusetts that have data that looks uh that that shares our industry. And what you'll notice here is you'll see the the traffic, the sessions versus the benchmark sessions over time. You'll notice that it starts here um right around uh April.

So this you can only go back 13 months. You can't go back any further than that. So it's an important thing to remember. Uh what do we see here? What we see is our site versus the benchmark on each of these major uh digital channels.

What is it that um what do we have going on versus the benchmark? I'm gonna zoom this back up to the United States here. We do market, we don't market just regionally, we market to the whole air with the whole nation. Okay. And what we see here, uh by the way, when you restrict geography, it also changes your traffic to show you the traffic just for that region, just so that folks are aware.

Um, what we see here is that on some channels uh we're doing pretty well. We're doing you know a decently well, uh exceeding the benchmark, and other channels we're not. Now, there's a caveat here. The caveat is that everyone in the benchmark has to have set up their Google Analytics properly. So one of the things that can go wrong here, for example, is uh if you've never gone into your channel groupings and set, for example, like mail.google.com to be in the email channel versus say the referral traffic channel, which is the way it the way it is out of the box, then uh it's entirely possible that there could be a little bit of uh misleading information here because this runs on the default channel grouping.

So uh for us, email as a channel outperforming the benchmark by 182%. Apparently, at least in this time frame. Actually, I'm gonna shorten this to uh March, April 1 of 2020 so that we're not pulling in data. There we go. It exceeds the benchmark.

The suspense is killing me. Yeah, the processing time is killing me. Well, what I like about this kind of report is, and I know we're gonna get into sort of the so what and how do you use it, is that you can look at yourself up against your peers, and then you can look at your stretch goals, so where you are now versus where you want to be, and it will give you some direction around the things that you need to work on. But I do think that that's an important caveat, Chris, of making sure that when you're looking at the data that not only is your data set up correctly with the channel groupings, but taking keeping in mind that the other companies that you're competing against might not have it set up correctly. So it's not meant to be an exact competitive tool.

It's meant to give you guidance in terms of what areas you could build a little bit more uh resources in. Yep, exactly. Okay, that decided it was just gonna go on vacation. There we go. All right, so from April 1 of 2020 to now, uh, we're looking at we we did 151% better than the benchmark, right?

Uh, in terms of apples to apples for email traffic for social media, uh, we were about three two and a half percent below the benchmark. So we uh so for other similar companies in our space, uh, we didn't do quite as well with social media. Um, then we go to referral traffic. This is where we might, for example, what might want to have a PR firm because we did very badly against the benchmark, 84% less than other sites for getting referring sites to send us traffic. Direct traffic, I'm not terribly concerned about here because direct in Google's language means we don't know where the data came from.

And I, for one, would always love to have less direct traffic than our competitors because it means our attribution is better. Um this one is the one that concerns me. Number six, organic search. Uh compared to similar sized sites, or we are substantially lower than in organic search traffic. Uh paid search is not terrible or display.

When we don't run a ton of ads, so I'm not terribly worried about that. So just looking at this benchmark here of uh similarly sized uh companies. Uh we are doing well on email and social. And I would say we need to do some some heavy lifting on referral and organic if we want to uh get to uh the same performance as our peers. I don't disagree with that assessment.

And what that does for us is it confirms some of our anecdotal thinking around where we should be focusing our time in terms of working on and focusing on the business. Exactly. Now, to your point, Katie, we everybody loves that management cliche, you know, taking things to the next level. Actually, nobody loves that cliche. Nobody loves that.

But there actually is a menu for that for real. So we can take this is the literal next level. What does it look like for us to go to uh the next type of traffic? Email we're actually okay on already. So we've already exceeded the the benchmark there.

Um we need 60% more social media traffic. Uh we need a lot more organic search traffic, and we need more referral traffic. So those those gap areas, no surprise. Um, those gap areas are areas where we need to do some filling in the blanks, and we may want to look at paid search or display advertising. Uh if you know if it would make sense to do so.

How about balancing that off against the bounce rate too? Because it looks like we're just you know, we are so much stickier than the rest of the crowd with that. That is true. So there we have pages, pages per session and and bounce rates. Uh that's engagement numbers.

So for the traffic that we do earn, does the traffic stick around more? Um, we certainly have a much lower bounce rate across the board. Uh we also have uh more pages per session. So when people get to us, it means our content is good, and that's a really important point because it just getting more traffic doesn't matter if people hate you and leave. Um so in this case, we know we've got good stuff, we just need to get people to it now.

Well, that then becomes the so what, you know, so what? What do you do with this? How do you get more people to you know your website? And you know, I think it's also interesting. So we know we do a lot with email, and email is one of those channels that we have control over, however, as we've said before, like when looking at like an attribution model, we're over indexed on email alone, and we don't have a nice healthy mix of channels that are working for us, and so this gives us a really good place to start, not just with you know, we see a lot of this in the attribution model, but we can also see against our competitors the things that they are doing that we're not doing, and that specifically is that referral traffic and that organic search.

Exactly right. So now the question is um, how would we go about influencing the both of those those channels? The referral traffic one is relatively straightforward. And if you do well with referral traffic, you will automatically do well with organic search, right? Because as more people are linking to you and sending you referral traffic, you are also building inbound links that then build your your organic search capabilities.

So the question I would say then is what do we need to do in order to get more and better referral traffic. That wasn't rhetorical. Make more friends. Make more friends would be good. Um one thing I'd suggest doing is that instead of you know we've done the benchmarking here.

Now we need to start digging into what some of the stuff means. So referral traffic is one of those things that's measured in acquisition. So if I go into acquisition all traffic and go to referrals, um, the first thing I can look at here is to say, okay, well, where are we getting our traffic from? Where you know what is referral traffic do we currently get? Um, and most of what shows up in referrals, remember, this is Google's categorization of the stuff, comes from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

This is our first three channels. My personal blog, there's some bot traffic, um, marketing over coffee, talk walker, and some more stuff with Facebook. So we actually have a decent amount of stuff coming in from uh social media. If we switch over to source medium for the same time period, there's email, organic search, more email, some social media stuff. I need to go fix my link shortener apparently because it's not coming into social.

Uh Facebook, LinkedIn, more email, some pay-per-click advertising, more email. So if we start digging down further into what else, where else are we getting referrals from? So Sharpspring, um, I that's uh someone else's email newsletter right there. Um this one I don't even recognize W3 Lab. So I might want to go check out who is that.

Like what what is that referring source? Expand this further. We have dirt from marketing over coffee that keeps showing up on here. Oh, yeah, baby. That's all I got.

ElegantThemes Medium.com, which is the blogging platform, YouTube, which is one of the platforms we do our live stream on, more email, uh something called M Show Productions. Oh John Yep, social media city Veronica Gentili uh here. We have another uh what that eco search engine. So you we ought to already know that we've got some existing places that are sending us referral traffic. Um low-hanging fruit is going back to those places and seeing you know, what do we do with them and can we do more of it if it wasn't things that we paid for, um, which hopefully it would not be because that should be not be in referral traffic, um, we would want to go out and do more of those things.

The challenge is, and this is something you can't get out of the benchmarking data, is where the what who are the competitors and where are they getting their traffic from? Right. That would be awfully nice to have. It would be, but I'm guessing that Google would say, great, and that's gonna cost you a million dollars to get that information. Um, yes.

But it does occur to me, you know, to your question of like how do you get more referral traffic? One of the things that is generally pretty foolproof is guest blogging. So if you yourself can land um, you know, a guest blogging post on other, you know, major providers, like you know, for us it would be a talk walker or a marketing profs, or even um you know, a marketing over coffee or Martech or those those types of uh outlets, that would then be that well-known um asset to then drive traffic back to us. Exactly. So one of the ways that we identify stuff like that is to actually look at at those backlinks, take a competitor and where is it that they're getting their backlinks from?

So I'm gonna pull up uh our SEO software here. You can use any SEO software you like, they all pretty much do the same thing when it comes to backlinks. I'm gonna go plug into the uh site explorer here and let's look at marketing over coffee as an example. I'm gonna pull in the backlinks report. These are the people who are linking to marketing over coffee.

Uh, it would be a good idea for us to figure out okay, how can we uh who else should be linking to us? So we have like Word Stream, for example, 99 Signals, uh, 30 best podcasts. Real simple, straightforward thing that I think would make a lot of sense. Trust Insights has a podcast, right? So if for all these places that have you know 30 best podcasts or whatever, um, ask them, hey, would you consider adding the in ear insights podcast to your list for next year's uh thing?

But again, great way to just get an understanding of who's linking in and start building those referral links. Um, some tools even have what's called link intersect, uh, which I think is kind of interesting. So let's put in marketing over coffee.com. Let's put in my personal website. Let's put in uh marketingprofs.com who doesn't link to trust insights.ai so this is going to go through and look at you know who who is in common for the backlinks to those other sites um that is not linking to trust insights and uh who those things are how many intersections there are uh hubspot business insider hbr Salesforce and so on and so forth uh again this is a great punch list of who are the platforms that we might want to go after and try and get links to the Trust Insights website marketing insider group and so on and so forth yeah so is it really though this is just kind of the classic SEO blood and guts of somebody has to go down the list and be like hey wouldn't you love to get a post from Trust Insights I mean there's really no other way around that is there uh I mean that's the the short version of it um the ideal would be to build real identify um maybe the top five or ten and build some strong relationships with those folks first before you pitch them um because you know nobody likes getting those link pitches they go immediately in the trash bin or uh you know other bad things happen to people who've run those you sound like you speak from personal experience Chris I will plead the fifth fair enough so we've done our benchmarking now in Google Analytics and we've identified what the area that we think uh is a problem for us one one or more of the problems so now this is how you go in uh and you identify, okay, well, what do we do about this thing?

Chris, is there a way? Um, I know there's a way. Is there a simple way I should qualify to turn this into dollars? So for example, I know um we've done this exercise for a client where we were able to say by not focusing on your organic search, you're leaving X number of dollars on the table. And I don't expect us to go through that exercise uh live, but something for us to think about is for us not focusing as much on referral in organic search, what kind of money are we leaving on the table?

Yeah, that's a good question. Um the short answer is in theory, yes. And and we can walk through a toy example of that. I'm gonna hit export and just turn this into an Excel spreadsheet because that sort of computation is not something you could do with the Google Analytics interface itself. Correct.

So when you get your spreadsheet from Google, you obviously get the day by day stuff, which we'll get back to that in a second. But we also get uh exactly what you saw in the main interface. I'm gonna go delete the total row because we don't need that. And let's go ahead and just resize. Column width should be no, it's the other format menu.

Okay, so here is our sessions, the benchmark sessions, and then sort of the delta, the big difference. I'm gonna actually delete these other columns because I don't care about them right now. Um, you can do this with them later. Uh, and I just want to know the difference, right? So the difference here between our sessions and the benchmark sessions.

And this is a period of time of 13 months, right? So in 13 months, I take this and divide this by by 13. Let's make this a little bit bigger so we can see what we're doing. And this tells me what my traffic gap is, right? So I can see that on a monthly basis for organic search.

I need an additional 2200 visitors a month, right? On a monthly basis, I need an additional 470 uh visitors from referral traffic. Now, if you were to go into uh even if you were to say, you know, let's say we we made I don't know uh a million dollars in the last in the last 13 months, right? Um we have our total number of sessions here, so let's let's sum this up. And this is some pretty pretty basic math.

32,000 sessions. So what is our our dollar per session? It'll be a million bucks divided by our 32,000 sessions. So each session is worth in this toy example, uh $30.58. Knowing that, I'm gonna take each of these things here times this fixed value of.

Yeah, that's monthly too, right? Yeah, that's monthly. So let's actually change this to E. There we go. I mean, those are not insignificant numbers.

Right. So on an annual basis, yeah, on an annual basis. We could have made an additional $900,000 from organic search if we'd gotten our act together and made it a priority or hired us uh uh an SEO agency, right? And one of the things is if you're if you're too busy to do something, you hire. Um we've been working with B Squared Media uh for some of our paid search advertising because we just don't have the time and the expertise to do it.

And when it comes to like how much do you want to spend, this is one possible way to sort of set like maybe a ceiling on your budget to say, like I want to I'd be willing to spend up to this amount because if I could reclaim that um, you know, uh in this example of making a million dollars, uh that would be that how much money now. If we want to be let's let's tone that down a bit, let's say it was just a hundred thousand dollars, right? Even there, you know, would you invest, you know, say $20,000 in paid advertising for the year to make $35? That seems like pretty good ROI. Um, so this is again a really good way to tune this to figure out okay, if if traffic equals conversions, which most of the time it does in some form or fashion, um, and I can generate more traffic, I should see more conversions as long as the traffic is qualified.

And that's this is how much money we could potentially bring in if we got that kind of traffic in. This is a really handy back of the envelope calculation. Again, it's not precise, but it's really helpful, especially if you're trying to justify this is why we need more focus on organic search, or this is why I need my team to do more outreach to get placements. Um, you know, or this is why we just need to not do the bare minimum on social media, because again, $500 is not insignificant, it's still money that's being left on the table. Yeah, exactly.

If somebody said to you, would you like $500 right now? You'd probably say, sure, what's the catch? They said there is no catch, like, okay, then yes, I would take $500 from you, strange person uh who's giving away lots of money. You just way overcomplicated that example. What else is there?

Sure. Um, but this also helps us prioritize too, right? Ignoring direct direct and over there, we should probably just delete those because those are meaningless. Um what's there? That's weird.

Um just black those out because that's just not helpful. Of these values, you know, organic search really has to be our priority. It has to be it has now the good news is because referral traffic and organic search are so tightly entwined, doing one uh well usually helps the other, but it really has to be a priority going forward for the for our data if we want to bring in that money at the same time not taking away from the channel that you were killing it on, right? So if we extend this calculation more, email marketing, we're bringing in you know X amount of over what our competitors are are bringing in, right? Which by the way is an important distinction.

This uh is we're measuring on the difference. So if we were trying to talk about you know revenue and market share, we're doing well and we're compensating for the loss in some other areas with email. So we don't want to lose traction there while we try and figure out how do we fix these other things. Completely makes sense. It's interesting there too, with how you know it looks like well, it is saying clearly that we're pretty close to the hunt on social.

And so some people would think, oh, then let's you know put more gas towards that and really lean on it. But when you look at how far out organic search is in the dollar figure, you know, if you had to pick, hey, we can make a 10% improvement in any one of these, you know, suddenly organic search is just obviously where you want to throw the cash. Exactly. And you know, again, this works for any kind of company. We're we're here essentially amortizing out the digital aspect.

Um, we don't do a whole lot of marketing other than digital, so this this does work pretty well. It will work less well, like if you have a substantial brick and mortar uh uh presence, because you obviously you would have to do some statistical analysis up front to see if website traffic correlates to you know feet coming through the front door, and if it does, great. If it doesn't, then you know this calculation may not necessarily be as helpful. Oh, I see because you're saying we were able to just throw the whole revenue number onto that, whereas we can't do that if there's other channels outside. Exactly, exactly.

Um, one of the things that you could do is you could take all the channels that you have and run a correlation analysis to figure out which channels have a higher mathematical correlation to that that revenue number, and then figure out, yep, like these are the ones that we can use this analysis for. These are the ones where we can't. Interesting. So our so what from this is we best get our acts together in terms of our own SEO for our own website. And that includes the technical on-site SEO, making sure that the website itself is functioning correctly, uh, reoptimizing older pages, and then what net new content do we need need to be creating?

And so that's where we need to take our SEO. Um, Chris, I know that one of the other bullet points you wanted to cover in this episode was how to forecast your traffic. Um I will actually park on that for a second because I want to go back to something you said. When we were looking, and this is something that John pointed out in the benchmark. Um, we're looking at like the content performance uh in the benchmark.

The content's not the problem. Um from an SEO perspective, if I put our site into you know the SEO tool of choice, it to me, you know, looking at this becomes pretty obvious that in the last year we've really plateaued in terms of inbound links, right? This is the the issue that we have is that we have uh essentially you know held still at the number of inbound links that we get. We don't have a problem with attracting people with content, we have a problem with the ranking itself, the ability to show up for any given search, and that comes from inbound links. Um, and I I know that we like our technical stuff.

We know from other episodes we've done of this show, uh, that our technicals are in pretty good condition. Our content's pretty decent. It's it's okay enough that we see that from our most valuable pages assessment. We see the big headline content like the resources, um, like the Instagram uh talk and stuff, they do well. Where we really suck is we're not doing any pitching.

We're not doing any and you see that because referral and organic are the two problem areas that march in lockstep, right? So we're not doing enough to get out to other people to bring them in. If we can do that, um we will we'll actually see substantial multiplier effects because the content's already good. So how do we go about now getting people to link to our resources to link to this show, for example? That's where our gap is.

Makes sense. You know, I think one of the things that we used to be able to rely on was uh the speaking circuit. Um, you know, and you know, that's starting to uh crop back up. I mean, Chris, you're fully vaccinated now. Uh shows are starting to open up as it becomes a little bit safer to do so.

So I do think that that will start to help, but I'm my making the assumption that the lack of speaking that we've done over the past year and a half has definitely been part of that hit because um though those events like to talk about the speakers. There's a reason they have those speakers because those speakers are known, so they link to their sites, they link to their assets, and we just haven't had a lot of those opportunities. Yep. I think that's certainly part of it. The other thing that, you know, if you look at what gets links, inbound links on the Trust Insights website.

When we go in here, let's look at top pages 2.0. So these are the pages that get traffic that get links and stuff. Some of these are blog posts. A lot of these are like the 12 days of data stuff that we've done. The thing that I see when I look at this is we have a lot of data that we publish that isn't on our website.

And so one an easy win. Um, and again, this is something that requires you just to spend some time thinking about it. And obviously, I as we're trying to focus more on building the company itself. Um we do a really terrible job with this. In every issue of the newsletter, there's two blog posts effectively, right?

There is the cold open, and there is the data diaries that have these really compelling graphics and stuff. You know, here's how we're forecasting the future. And this lives only in our newsletter. So one of the easiest things that I can think of when I look at this, uh, and you know, look at every issue of our newsletter. Uh, you know, here's this week's data, here's this week's data on what's happening with Facebook brand engagement rates, is have one of our team members like Emily take a part of the newsletter and publishes two different blog posts each week.

Because I literally just wrote that down as a today. I was like, oh duh. Exactly. This one right here, Facebook brand media engagement rates. We get that, and then to send a quick note, or maybe even just tweet it then at social media today.com, social media examiner, you know, all the you know, business insider, whoever would be focusing on this data, like, hey, here's a new release.

And and that individual blog post becomes the thing that people link to. Yep. Makes sense. It's not like we don't do it the work anyway. We just are not it's one of those things like we have great ingredients, we just forget that you can take something, cut it up, and do something else with it.

It's almost like if there was some sort of like a transmedia framework that talked about this somewhere. No, but I mean, you know, I always find these live streams uh beneficial, not only as we're demonstrating, but also because we use ourselves as an example, it always sort of gives me that aha, here's what we need to be doing instead, because we're now taking the time to really dig in because in just looking at the benchmarking, my thought seeing organic search is okay, we need more content and we need to re-optimize the content that we have. But that's actually not what's happening because we have content. What we need to do is get um more of that referral traffic back to our site with that content. And it's that's just such a different tactic.

And I would have been focusing in the wrong area. Yep. And when you think about it now, we have our Monday summary blog post, we have the new we have the podcast that gets published on Wednesdays. Um, we have the live stream summary that gets published on Fridays. If we split up the newsletter to two blog posts, one for Tuesday, one for Thursday, now we have a cadence of one new piece of content every single day of the week.

That is that is a very fast pace without having to do a lot of extra work. And by doing that, it gives us obviously more stuff we can push to our social channels, it gives us more things we can run ads to. Um, so there's a lot that we can do just from this stuff. But we would probably not like to your point, we probably would not have spent a lot of time doing that if we had not done the benchmarking exercise and realized our content's in good shape. People like this stuff.

Right. We just don't have enough of the people. That's right. Well, and so you know, a note about if you're going to go through the benchmarking exercise, it is definitely something that if you're going to take action with the information you're seeing, you're going to want to, you know, take the benchmark and snapshot it, but then every month or every three months rerun it to see if the things that you're doing are actually making a difference. I mean, that's really the so what.

The benchmark is great if you're looking at it, but if you're not gonna do anything about it, then why are you there? Exactly. The other last twist I'll say about benchmarking is that you also want to pay some attention. Uh, if you go into Google Analytics, go down to conversions, go into multi-channel funnels, and assuming you have everything set up properly here, um, you're gonna want to just take a look at either here or in your model comparison tool for which channels also convert the best. Because you know, if you look here, referral traffic um in both uh last click and an assisted referral traffic's kind of near the bottom, right?

So the traffic that we're getting from referral isn't great quality. So our current this tells me that our current strategy for referral traffic doesn't really work. So whatever we're doing right now, like if we if we had a PR agency, for example, we would say, like, look, you guys suck, you're getting us crap traffic that doesn't convert. We don't have a PR agency, so we can say that. Um Right, you're looking at the PR agency.

Exactly. It's no wonder we don't work at a PR agency anymore. So to your point, we would want to start this publishing and that outreach that you know uh it's composing a tweet saying, hey, you might be interested in having that be something that you know just pings people. Uh then we look at this data as well in three months, along with the new benchmark to say, did we get new referral traffic? Great.

Was the traffic any good? Well, and I think that that's definitely the differentiator, you know, John, as you smartly pointed out and Chris as you're going over, you know, is it any good? Because getting plenty of traffic to your website is fantastic. But if people aren't staying, if people aren't actually reading the stuff, if people aren't coming back and engaging and actually converting, then who cares? Yep, exactly.

At worst, it's it's attracting, you know, bots and spam. Nobody needs more of that. No. So that's benchmarking and then what to do about it. And one of the challenges that folks will run into is the knowing what to do about it.

So that you can do the benchmark exercise, but then you have to be able to interpret the results. Um so just do don't just run the benchmark and dump it on somebody's desk and hope that they get it. Uh, because they probably won't. You're gonna need to spend some time uh with that. And if you'd like to to get a second opinion on your benchmark, uh just go ahead and ping us.

Uh go to trustinsights.ai slash contact, and uh we'll be happy to talk about helping you get that second opinion. Or if you're not even sure if your Google Analytics is set up correctly, we're happy to help with that as well. Because that's where you gotta start. Exactly. Any parting words?

Check your reports and go do something. What he said. Alright, folks. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next week.

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