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Most marketers know they should be paying attention to analytics – but figuring out where to start is often the hardest part. Stop drowning in dashboards and reports! Digital measurement consultant Kyle Akerman discusses how small marketing teams can cut through the noise, focus on the metrics that matter, and use data to make smarter decisions without getting overwhelmed.
Your Analytics Don’t Have to Feel Like Homework
When a lot of us hear the word “analytics,” we do one of two things. We tune out, or we feel a low-grade dread, like analytics is the punishment we got for the crime of enjoying the creative side of marketing.
I get it. You came here to write headlines and build campaigns, not to stare at a dashboard with 400 reports and a graph that may as well be in another language. So when my guest Kyle Akerman, a digital measurement consultant who spends his days helping small B2B marketing teams, told me that measurement can be simple and even a little fun, I wanted to hear how.
The problem isn’t you, it’s how the whole thing gets framed.
Stop treating data as the destination
Your data isn’t the goal. Revenue and profit are the goal. Analytics is just the feedback loop that tells you whether the creative work you’re so proud of is doing its job.
“Are they building the brand? Are they driving leads? Are they getting us conversions?” That’s the whole reason we measure, Kyle told me, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Most businesses never need to wade into the deep end of data overwhelm to get useful insights. You can keep it simple and still walk away smarter. Joe Pulizzi, when he ran Content Marketing World, figured out that people who signed up for his email list were three times more likely to buy a ticket to the event. That one data point, newsletter signups, became a key metric because it tied directly to revenue. The trick is finding your version of that.
Ask three questions, not thirty
Kyle uses a framework he picked up from Jeff Sauer called QIA: questions, information, actions. Starting with “questions” puts curiosity before data collection. You start with the questions you want answered, you figure out what information you need to answer them, and you decide ahead of time what action you’ll take based on what you see.
The part that stuck with me was the discipline around questions. Write down three to five, tops. Not ten.
“If you have 10 KPIs, then nothing’s a KPI,” Kyle said, and he’s right. When everything is a priority, nothing is. So pick the handful of questions that tie most directly to money (leads, demo signups, an event, whatever drives your business) and let the rest go.
And decide what you’ll do before you look. If leads come in below target, what’s your move? Right on target? Above it, but the leads are junk? Knowing your response in advance is the difference between watching your data and using it.
Don’t wait until December to check the map
A lot of teams run a report at the end of the quarter, or worse, the end of the year, then discover they missed their goals with no time left to fix anything.
I think of it like a cross country trip. If you’re driving from Maine to California and you don’t check your progress until day ten, you might look up and realize you’re in Florida. Faster feedback means you course correct while it still counts.
Kyle also referenced something Dana DiTomaso calls “directional analytics,” and it’s a useful permission slip for offline businesses or any situation where you can’t draw a straight line between a campaign and a dollar. You don’t always need precision. You need direction.
That doesn’t mean living inside Google Analytics. Kyle would rather you didn’t. Google Analytics is where all the noise lives, and it’s easy to get hit with shiny object syndrome and drown in reports you don’t need.
Instead, build a simple one page dashboard in a tool like Looker Studio that shows only the few things you decided to track. Fewer distractions, faster answers. If you want to take a deeper dive later, that’s when you open the bigger tool.
The beer and tacos rule
My favorite idea from our conversation was what Kyle calls his “beer and tacos measurement strategy.” Beer is good on its own. Tacos are good on their own. Put them together and something better happens.
The lesson: never look at one number in isolation. Pair it with a second one and you get a fuller story. Leads alone tell you a little. Leads plus conversion rate tell you a lot. Maybe you’re hitting your lead target but converting almost none of them, and the raw number was hiding that.
Same goes for traffic. Top traffic sources are useful, but pair them with landing pages and now you know where people are entering your site and what’s pulling them in. As Kyle put it, one and one is three.
This pairing is also your defense against being fooled. Kyle has watched clients celebrate a 20% traffic spike that turned out to be bot traffic from overseas, the kind with one second of engagement and zero value. If he’d only looked at the traffic number, he’d have thrown a party. Looking one layer deeper told the real story.
So when you see a spike or a dip, get curious instead of excited or panicked. Was it useful traffic? Did conversions move with it? Context is king.
Twenty five minutes and a Friday
Now for the part that makes all of this doable. When Kyle asked marketers how much time they spend on measurement, the typical answer landed around 1% of their week. That’s roughly 24 minutes a month.
His suggestion isn’t to triple that. It’s to spend about 25 minutes once a week, say on a Friday, and rotate your focus. One week you look at traffic sources and landing pages. The next, your top blog posts and what people do after reading them. The week after, conversions and the path people took to get there.
It’s the gym, basically. I know plenty of people who go all in for the month of January with some punishing routine, then quit by February. Kyle goes to the gym five days a week, and on the days he doesn’t feel like it, he still goes and does something, because something beats nothing. Your analytics work the same way. Build the reps.
There’s a quieter payoff here too. Data has a way of removing assumptions. Kyle says he constantly shows clients numbers that make them go “well, I didn’t know that,” because so much of what we believe about our own marketing is a guess we never checked.
Where to start this week
If you’re nodding along but not sure what to do Monday morning, here’s the simple version.
- First, write down two or three questions you genuinely want answered about your marketing.
- Second, get analytics on your site if you haven’t already, set up through Google Tag Manager so you can grow into it, and make sure you’re using UTM tags so you can tell your traffic sources apart.
- Third, define what counts as a conversion for your business and tell your tools, because they won’t know unless you say so. Then build one clean dashboard with just those answers on it.
That’s it. You don’t need to understand every report. You need a few good questions, a 25-minute weekly check-in, and the habit of pairing your numbers so they tell you the truth.
You can find Kyle on LinkedIn (he’s the Kyle Akerman in Nashville) and grab his newsletter for small marketing teams at kyleakerman.com/newsletter. I signed up the second we stopped recording.
Now go open that dashboard. Beer and tacos optional, but encouraged.
Transcript from Kyle Akerman’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is a digital measurement consultant in Nashville, who loves helping small B2B marketing teams use data to make smarter business decisions. For fun, he’s a DJ for community radio stations CHIRP Radio and WXNA. He also loves improv and wishes he had discovered it 20 years ago.
Today, we’re going to be looking into getting real, valuable data out of your analytics without getting overwhelmed, with Kyle Akerman. Kyle, welcome to the podcast.
Kyle: Thanks for having me, Rich. I’m excited to join this powerful network of marketers that you’ve built.
Rich: Thank you. You know, when you’re as old as me, you just start to attract people over the years. So I appreciate it.
So I’m kind of curious. You’re into improv, which is the one art form that makes me cringe, because I’m always so afraid that people won’t be able to come up with the next clever thing they’re supposed to say. Is there any lessons that you’ve taken from improv that help you with your marketing or working with these small marketing teams?
Kyle: Yes. A lot of it. All improv is, is really just communication skills. You know, we think it’s like, oh, improv is how to be funny. That’s a byproduct. But it’s really they’re teaching you how to listen, how to pay attention, how to be comfortable with failure, how to work as a team. So I would say the listening part is the thing that I’ve really grasped onto.
And then applying that to how I’m helping clients. And when I started improv, I started at age 40. I wasn’t do it because I wanted to go into comedy. I was living in Chicago, and that’s the capital of improv, and I just wanted to do it for fun and learn those skills. And I felt more confident when I was done with the training.
And in that bio you read, I was like, “Why didn’t somebody teach me this when I was 20?” Like, my life would’ve been, I don’t know how but would’ve been completely different. And it just gives you confidence, too. You know, when you’re talking to clients, sometimes we have the imposter syndrome. But as long as you can help them, you’ll be good.
Rich: And if they throw you a curveball, you’ve prepared for any eventuality with, “Yes, and…”
Kyle: Exactly, because you’re just building. Now, I took all the classes and everything, performed just a little bit. I’m an average improv player. Bu at its most simplest, I think one of my teachers just said, “Listen and respond.” Don’t already have a thought in your head. You know how we all wait? I’m going to wait till you’re done talking, Rich, so I can say what’s important. That just kills improv or working with clients, too.
Rich: Makes a lot of sense. Now, how did you end up focusing on analytics and measurement, especially for these small marketing teams?
Kyle: Yeah, so I’ll try to condense the story. I actually have an engineering background. I worked for Motorola the first half of my career designing cell phone hardware. While I was there, I went to business school and got interested in marketing.
And then when I eventually got laid off from Motorola around 2010, and then I decided to switch over to marketing. And at first, I was trying to kind of squash the engineering side of my brain. I’m like, “I don’t want anything to do with this.” But then I realized that engineering is just kind of problem-solving, and that kind of led me to the measurement side of marketing.
And so then I kind of started applying it there. And then as I started attracting clients and things like that, I really saw a need to help those small marketing teams because they don’t have the resources. You know, larger companies might have a team, a data team, or maybe they have an agency that provides them with all that stuff. But there’s so many companies out there of one to three-person marketing teams, and they’re just dying for measurement help. And so I try to fill that gap.
Rich: So as you work with these different teams, what do you think the number one problem or challenge that they face with analytics is?
Kyle: I think there’s two, and I was thinking about this earlier today. First is just time. They’re trying to do everything, right? Create content, come up with strategy, maybe run events, all the things that marketers do. And measurement kind of gets pushed down to the bottom of the to-do list, so they don’t have a lot of time for it.
And then I think they’re reluctant to spend time because they just haven’t developed the expertise. You know, they don’t quite understand tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, any kind of reporting tool because they can be overwhelming. And if you’re not using them, if it’s not part of your daily job, you’re not going to be great at it.
And whenever we struggle with something, we just inherently spend less time on it. So I think the not having time and not having the skills are probably the biggest challenges that I’m trying to overcome.
Rich: Yeah. When a lot of us hear the word ‘analytics’, we either tune out or we immediately feel overwhelmed. For those of us who love marketing because we love to be creative, it sometimes feels like the punishment for getting into marketing.
So at a high level, what role should analytics actually play in our marketing according to you?
Kyle: For me, analytics is like the feedback loop, right? Like, if we’re creating all of these things, these awesome designs, these awesome campaigns, great messaging, whatever the thing is we’re creating, we want to know how they’re performing. Are they building the brand? Are they driving leads? Are they getting us conversions? And that’s where measurement can help.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be, but most businesses don’t need to jump into the data overwhelm to get good insights. They can keep it simple and get some really helpful insights.
Rich: Now, you’ve said that data itself isn’t the goal, that revenue and profit are. Amen to that. How should we be thinking about our analytics in that context?
Kyle: I think you need to know… Well, first of all, let’s take a step back. The whole reason we measure and the data tools, all’s they’re doing is helping us answer our top questions, our business questions, our marketing questions.
So starting from the standpoint of what are the questions we want to answer, and then if we’ve asked the right questions, they should kind of point to the metrics that could tie to revenue and profit. So we kind of need to know what things drive your revenue, whether that’s a product sale or types of leads. You know, I need demo signups. Or sometimes it’s just maybe you run an event.
So I remember I used to go to Content Marketing World all the time back when Joe Pulizzi was still running it, and he said that people that signed up for their newsletter were three times more likely to then come to Content Marketing World. And that’s a big-ticket item for them. So one of his key metrics then was to get people on their email list.
Rich: Interesting.
Kyle: So I think knowing what things … and you won’t always be able to tie things to the money, but if you can do that, then that’ll help you know what data to look at and then where to go find it.
Rich: That is an interesting question. And it wasn’t one I was planning on asking, but now that you brought it up, there is sometimes a disconnect between the online world and the offline world. And I’m thinking about a restaurant that we just started working with who really didn’t have any sort of analytics set up. But they’re interested in doing a better job of tracking where their marketing dollars are going.
Kyle: Yeah.
Rich: The only thing you can really do on their website is book a reservation, which actually happens through a third-party tool.
Kyle: Okay.
Rich: So we can talk about using Facebook or Google to drive traffic to the website. We can look at some of the analytics on the website to talk about, did they visit the page we were expecting? But is there a way, in your opinion, to tie that directly or indirectly to revenue, to the booking of tables, which is something they told us is one of the things that they measure in the real world?
Kyle: Yeah, I think it’s always been a challenge to combine the online and the offline stuff. And I think Dana in the past, Dana DiTomaso, has talked about directional analytics. So they might have to, because their goal isn’t necessarily for people to come to the website, unless it’s the booking tool. They’re trying to get people in the door.
So I think if you had some kind of a spreadsheet or a graph or however you wanted to visualize it, they know how many tables they’re turning over or how many customers they had each night. And then they know when they’re running campaigns or if it’s just a steady, you know, we post on Facebook every day, it might be a daily activity. But they have to kind of see how those two correlate, I think, to get an idea of if it’s working or not.
The other thing that might work for an offline business is email. Depending on what you’re selling, whether it’s a restaurant or something like that, through email you could promote coupons or your specials. You know, Friday night is happy hour, or we have improv on Tuesday nights in the back room of the bar, whatever the thing is.
So you could try to kind of map the things together that way. But that’s a tricky one. It’s kind of like the old billboard question, you know? Like, how do we measure the effectiveness of a billboard?
Rich: Or a networking event.
Kyle: Yeah.
Rich: Sometimes you just have to look at trends.
Kyle: Exactly. Yeah.
Rich: All right.
Kyle: Sometimes word of mouth can, even though it’s a small sample size, it can still be useful.
Rich: Now when you and I previously chatted, we came up with the idea of, how could we make analytics simpler for these small marketing teams, and the idea of walking before you run, having that approach. So with that in mind, what is the simplest way for people to get started with all this? What should be some of our first either questions or actions as we’re trying to really take ownership of our analytics?
Kyle: Yeah, I would say the first thing is kind of, you know, it’s not really sexy but it’s just making a plan. And the plan can be simple. And I think Jeff Sauer in one of your old podcasts talked about the KIA. So I apply that to my stuff. So that’s questions, information, and action.
So it all starts with, what are those top questions that you want to answer? Whether they’re higher-level business questions or if they’re specifically about marketing like a specific marketing channel. But, jot down those three to five questions. Again, when you’re starting out, you’ve got to keep it simple. So I don’t want a list of 10 questions. Let’s start with, if you have 10 KPIs, then nothing’s a KPI. So apply that to everything.
So when you’re doing your plan, come up with three to five questions tops. Let’s start there. And then the information part of KIA is, what’s the data we need to collect to answer those questions. Now you may not have the technical expertise to know that, and then you might have to go partner with somebody like me or Jeff Sauer or Dana to help you with that. But then you’ll know what data you need, and then you can set that up in a simple report.
And I would not, when you’re starting out, I would not require yourself to go into Google Analytics or tools like that. There are so many tools that do reporting and visualization now, so Google’s product, Looker Studio, which I now think they just went back to calling it Data Studio. You can create a simple dashboard that’s easy for you to understand when you’re starting out, and it may only have a couple blocks on it, but it’ll help you answer your questions and track your progress. Because what I see a lot of times is people wait until maybe the end of the quarter or sometimes the end of the year to go, “Oh, did we meet our goals?” And they’re like, “No, we didn’t. Oh, shoot, we’ll have to try harder next year.”
It’s like, no, no, no, no. You need the feedback to be quicker. So if you have targets, you know your key metrics, you know what’s target. So let’s say, if you’re B2B, I need 100 leads a month to meet my revenue. Set up a simple dashboard that shows you how many leads you got. And then know what you’re going to do if you’re below near target or even above target, because maybe you’re getting crappy leads.
So that’s the A part is the ‘action’ in KIA. So kind of have an idea ahead of time what you’re going to do when you review your key metrics, and you see one of those conditions. Am I lower than expected, right on target, or above? And then make any necessary changes.
So I’m working with a large university right now that they’re in that year trap where they only do a year report. And I’m like, “Guys, we need to speed this up.” So we’re going to set up quarterly and hopefully monthly reporting to help them course correct as they go.
Rich: Yeah, because if you’re planning a cross-country trip and you don’t check your progress until 10 days in, you could find yourself in Florida instead of California, so makes a lot of sense.
So I’m just thinking as you’re talking about my own business. So I mean, we can’t track revenue in Google Analytics. We’re not selling anything online. But I can track the number of leads we’re getting, the contact form fills. And then probably offline, I would also need to give it a score rating of whether or not this is a good lead or somebody who wants to sell me SEO services from a third-world country, which happens three times a day.
And then if I was interested in tracking something specific, like how often are we getting traffic from AI, then that would be something else that might be a KPI if that was something that I felt was really important to my business. Am I understanding that correctly?
Kyle: Yeah, yeah. No, I think if we’re just talking about things happening on your website, you’re typically, your questions are going to deal with, there’s really only three categories that they’re going to fall in. You know, how are people getting to the site? What kind of engagement things are they doing once they’re there? What pages are they looking at? Are they scrolling? Are they clicking? Are they watching a video? And then what you’re calling a conversion, are they taking? Whether that’s filling out your contact form, scheduling a demo. It could be buying a product if they sell a physical product on your site.
So your questions are going to kind of deal with those three stages. And so yeah, the better questions you ask, the closer you will get to useful information that’ll help you adjust your marketing as you go.
Rich: Now, I know a lot of people who claim to look at their Google Analytics, but that’s all they do. They just look at their Google Analytics, sometimes with a glazed look in their eye. Sometimes they dig a little bit deeper. But once we start, once we, the listeners, start looking at our data, how can we avoid just being observers and actually put what we’re seeing into action?
Kyle: I think it kind of starts with, I was thinking about this. So two things, I guess. First, I kind of use the 80/20 rule with everything. So say we’re looking at traffic report. How are people finding your site? Almost every site has only two or three sources that drive all of their traffic.
Now, there are exceptions. But it’s usually Google search, and then direct, which is kind of an empty bucket, and that one is like a black box. And maybe it’s paid ads or something or email. But identifying, looking at how those sources that drive most of the traffic, how are they performing? And are they driving your important engagements or conversions? And if not, maybe why? And you’ll have to dig into, like, well, where are those people entering the site? That kind of thing. Maybe what were they searching for, in Google? So applying any, 80/20, and then along with that, maybe any specific segments that you know are important for your business.
So that could be a traffic source. But it might be a location if you’re only selling to a certain region. It could be maybe a device. There’s a big difference between how desktop visitors and mobile visitors experience your site. And you could have all kinds of issues with that on mobile, if your forms aren’t rendering correctly or something like that. So I think knowing your important segments and then kind of using 80/20. And then also just making sure you kind of understand some other basics like, we’re not going to get exact data, let’s look at the trends.
So even though I said we might set up a monthly report, I also like to look at a 12-month span of how your important thing is tracking. So if it’s leads, are my leads going up over 12 months? Are they going down? Is there a specific dip? You know, do I have seasonality? That kind of thing.
And then I guess sample size is another one I think people need to understand. Like, if you’re making a decision on two data points, understand there’s some inherent risk there versus, say, you had 1,000 data points, you know? And those are just some basic things that I think people should understand.
Oh, another one is where are you spending your time and your money? If you’re spending a lot on ads each month, then see how those ads are doing. I mean, that should be self-evident, but sometimes people don’t really dig into it. Or if you’re creating a ton of content, then how is that content performing? Is it driving newsletter signups? Is it driving any other important engagement metrics? You know, I think those are good starting points for looking at your data and taking action.
Rich: I’ve also seen that sometimes by looking at that data, you start to realize where things have gone off the rails early. Like you’re running a campaign in one specific area, but you’re seeing that the traffic’s coming from other places.
Kyle: Yeah.
Rich: That may mean that the campaign was set up incorrectly. And I’ve also had clients who run a wide swath of ads, and then they discover that all of the people who are booking rooms at their hotel are from Delaware or something like that. And that kind of gives them some information, “Hey, let’s double down on the Delaware audience because they seem to be the ones who are most in love with coming up to Maine,” or whatever the case may be.
Kyle: Yeah, yeah. Another idea just popped in my head, is also just being curious about spikes or dips in your data. And don’t just say like, “Oh, that was awesome. We got a traffic spike this month.” Well, but was it useful traffic?
And the reason why that’s relevant for me now is a couple of my clients over the last quarter or two, they’ve been getting all kinds of traffic from China and Singapore, and it’s all just bot traffic. And I can tell that by some markers in the data, like engagement of time of like one second, things like that. And so they might think if they only looked at the traffic number to their site, they’d be like, “Hey, it went up 20% this month. We’re doing awesome.” It’s like, no, you just got hit by a bunch of bots from a foreign country.
So digging one layer deeper than what the report might tell you I think is a useful, I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘skill’, but just a thing to put on your checklist.
Rich: I definitely agree. I think numbers can be incredibly misleading if you’re just looking at one set of numbers.
Kyle: Yep.
Rich: I think you need to be looking at two or even three sets to kind of triangulate in on what the truth is. Because in your example, you see a huge traffic spike or a huge traffic dip, and you may overreact, over-correct. And then when you look at some other stuff, oh, we got this huge spike, but we didn’t see any uptick in any of our conversions or anything like that. That tells you a different story than just our traffic is on the rise.
Kyle: Yeah. Context is king, and any kind of context you can add to your data, and it might just be having another data point. You know, having two things that you’re looking at. Because I sometimes call that “beer and tacos measurement strategy”. So beer is good by itself, and tacos are good by themselves. But if you put them together, that’s like magic.
So the way I apply that to measurement is just pick two things that will give you more information. You know, one and one is three. So like a perfect example is your number of leads. I want to know how many leads I got each month, but I also want to know my conversion rate for those leads.
Because maybe I’m meeting my leads, but I have a really low conversion rate or vice versa. It could be many combos. But you can get more information about what’s really happening on the traffic side. I talked about, “Hey, look at your top traffic sources,” but if you pair that with landing pages too, now you know where those people are entering your site. And that can give you some very useful information on what’s working and what’s not.
Rich: To circle back around to the whole walk before you run thing. From what we’ve talked about so far, the idea that I’m hearing from you is we first need to ask ourselves some questions about our business and what we want to track so that we know what’s the most important. And either whether we can do the setup of either Google Looker/Data Studio or we hire somebody from the outside to get these things set up, then we can start to monitor the situation.
We don’t want to check it once a month or once a year. We want to be in there on a fairly regular basis so we can see things as they happen so we can take faster, or we can respond to them more quickly.
Kyle: Right.
Rich: Let’s say that we’ve gotten that far. What are some of the things that would happen next? Like, how often should we be checking this? How much time each week should we dedicate to our analytics and reporting, either back to our bosses or to ourselves, so we can make better decisions?
Kyle: Yeah, I mean, that’s the million-dollar question, right? I’ve been asking some people, asking marketers kind of informally how much time they spend on measurement-related activities. Most people are giving me about 1% of their time, which I think it came out to 24 minutes a week, assuming a 40-hour work week. But I think you and I had mentioned that maybe that’s more like 24 minutes a month that people are doing.
Rich: Yeah, that sounds more reasonable.
Kyle: So I don’t know if we’re going to get people to spend more time. So maybe the challenge is how do we help them get the most out of the time they are going to spend?
So I would say, I mean, if you can spend… I think everyone should be able to spend, let’s just call it 25 minutes a week, like on a Friday. Just open up your analytics.
Rich: Over beer and tacos.
Kyle: Yeah, exactly. And so if you do 25 minutes each week. One week maybe you’re just looking at traffic sources. And maybe another dimension landing pages, to try to get an idea of like, okay my organic, everybody’s coming in on a blog post or they’re coming in on my service page, or just understanding the behavior. So that could be one week. Second week, maybe you’re looking at if you’re creating a lot of blogs, just look at the blogs. What are my top three blog posts? What do people do after that? You know, is there any overlap? Do people that read the blog sign up for a newsletter? Do they ever become clients?
You know, those type of things. Figure out how it’s helping you. And then maybe the third week when you spend your 25 minutes looking at the end of the funnel, so the conversions, and try to see are there specific traffic sources that are driving those conversions? Can we figure out how many steps it took to get to a conversion? You know, those kind of things.
So I think you can kind of parse it out. Because if we’re trying to make it easy on ourselves, we can’t consume all the data in one sitting. So if I tried to look at all those three things I just talked about in the first 25 minutes, I’m not going to do anything. I think when you’re starting out with this stuff, and even when you’ve been a seasoned pro, the way you get the most insight out of measurement is being intentional. It’s kind of boring, but you have to be very intentional about the questions you want to answer and the data that you need. And then only focus on those few reports. You can ignore everything else.
That’s why I don’t want people necessarily going into Google Analytics, because that’s where all the noise is and you get shiny object syndrome, and you’re like, “Oh my God, look at all these reports.” If you create a nice clean dashboard that only has what you need, there’s less distractions.
And then I kind of tell people, if you then want to take a deep dive, then maybe go into Google Analytics where you can get all that deeper information. But it’s a whole chicken and egg thing. People don’t have the skills, and then they go in there and they waste a lot of time, and then they’re like, “Ah, I’m never doing this again”.
Rich: And I think when you and I first chatted, I was talking about the idea of going to the gym. It’s like, it’s so hard when you’re just starting out with some sort of routine, is to go into the gym. And somebody gives you some crazy workout schedules with clean and jerks and all these things that just seem out of left field. And you go for the month of January, and you give up.
And that’s not what we want. Instead, by really trying to narrow your focus, and maybe even putting on those blinders and just focusing on the KPIs that answer the questions, you’re going to find more long-term success. At least that’s what you and I believe.
Kyle: Yeah.
Rich: So that’s the place to start.
Kyle: Yeah. I like that analogy because I go to the gym five days a week. But there’s days I don’t want to. But I do. And even if I don’t do the normal, “hey, this was an awesome workout,” just going and doing something is better than not going, you know?
And so I think you can apply that really to any part of marketing, but especially to measurement. Do something. Even if it’s the smallest thing. Spend five minutes, get familiar with the traffic report, because that’s kind of the first part.
The other thing is, what I like about data is it helps remove assumptions. And I find that people have a lot of assumptions about how their marketing is working. And then I show them the numbers, and they’re like, “Well, I didn’t know that.” I’m like, “This is why we look at this stuff to get you more informed.”
Rich: Excellent. If somebody was listening to this and they’re like, “Okay, I think in bite-sized pieces I might be able to manage this,” if they wanted to start improving the way that they used analytics right now, what is the first step that you would have them take?
Kyle: I’ll hit on a couple parts of it. So do that simple plan. Document it, because I think if you document a plan, you’re more likely to kind of follow through with it. So just start with two or three questions. Here’s what I want to know. Get some kind of analytics on your website.
You know, Google’s one of the most prevalent ones, Google Analytics. But there’s hundreds of tools you can use. But it’s free, it’s pretty easy. If you don’t know how to do the technical side, you can have a developer or somebody put it on there for you. To future-proof yourself from an implementation side, I would say set it up using Google Tag Manager, and you might need to hire somebody to do that. But you can still have a basic setup, but have Tag Manager.
And then two things that you need to set up to get good data is you have to try to understand all the traffic sources you use to drive people there, and make sure that you’re using UTM tags to accurately track that. And again, that might be a little technical, but there’s people that are going to help you with that.
And then at the bottom of the funnel, make sure you set up, because Google is just an average tool. It doesn’t know how your business works, so you have to tell it, “Hey, here’s what success looks like, so this is what I’m calling a conversion.” Set that up. So if you’ve got the traffic, you’re measuring that correctly with UTMs, and then you’ve got your custom conversion set up, I think that’s a great starting point.
And then maybe a simple dashboard, like a one-page Looker Studio. There’s even paid tools you can use that’ll give you a dashboard. But start with something like that. And then try to build those reps, if we’re going to use the gym analogy.
Rich: Awesome. Kyle, if people want to learn more about you and how you work with marketing teams, where can we send them online?
Kyle: You can find me on two places. You can find me on LinkedIn, I’m Kyle Akerman. I’m the one in Nashville. There are some other people with the same spelling, but I am in Nashville.
And on my website. Most of my content is through a newsletter, so kyleakerman.com/newsletter is where you can find that. And it’s geared towards helping the people we’ve been talking about today, these smaller marketing teams, helping them think through measurement.
Rich: Awesome. I’ll be signing up as soon as we finish up.
Kyle: All right.
Rich: Kyle, this has been great. I really appreciate it all your time and expertise.
Kyle: Thanks, Rich. It’s been a blast.
Rich: Okay, excellent.
Show Notes:
Kyle Akerman is a digital measurement consultant who helps small B2B marketing teams use analytics and data to make smarter decisions by simplifying measurement, improving reporting, and uncovering actionable insights without getting lost in the data. Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn or subscribe to his newsletter for practical advice on marketing measurement and analytics.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.