Looking at your traffic numbers should be a recurring task for your business that you add to your schedule. Let’s chat about why Data Day is such an important addition to your organic marketing calendar.
Episode Highlights:
Google Search Console
Pinterest Analytics
Google Analytics
Resources Mentioned:
Episode 55: Why Aren’t My Posts Getting Indexed?
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[00:00:37] And honestly, who am I kidding? I still love it because as I am recording this episode, in fact, I am regularly checking my kids' school website for next year's calendar, so I can start getting those dates added to my planner. So this Fresh Planner energy is actually the inspiration behind our August episodes of Pay Less for Traffic.
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[00:01:30] But looking at what's already working for your business and what's not will help the rest of your planning go so much more smoothly. So how often should you have a day where you dive into your numbers for your blog and your Pinterest account? Well, I do it once a month. I don't do it any more often than that because I would drive myself crazy, but I don't want it to go so long that, you know, I can't monitor and adjust. I wanna be able to notice things as they're happening and not two or three months down the line.
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[00:02:30] It's good to make a couple of extra stops just for some slightly more specific information. And so my favorite place to start on data day is Google Search Console, and I will explain why I don't go straight to Google Analytics in a little bit. So the first thing I like to do in Search Console is make note of the performance graph.
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[00:03:15] So this will show me the clicks and impressions for individual pages on my website. And then I like to sort this table by clicks so that I can see the top pages from my website for the past month. You'll notice that your top 10 posts will stay pretty consistent from month to month with seasonal posts getting occasional boosts.
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[00:04:08] And so overall it's just good to look for any red flags of sudden traffic losses so that you can try to troubleshoot that. And then it's also helpful to see what's doing well so that you can do more of that. Another thing that I like to check out when I'm in Google Search console is the list of posts that have not been indexed.
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[00:04:54] Now there's a lot more information that you can get from Google Search Console and you'll decide what information is important for you to track in your business. Sometimes I'll go down a rabbit hole of looking at the search queries that are bringing people to my website, but I actually work most of that into a different day that we're gonna talk about later this month.
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[00:05:41] Now I received a great question from a listener, asking, you know, what should they be looking for in their analytics and what should they be doing with these numbers? And so to kind of touch on that question, I'm going to share what I do in Pinterest on data day. There are three numbers that I track on Pinterest and record every month.
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[00:06:33] Because when pins are ranking well on search or in the home feeds of non followers, the follower count will organically increase. When pins aren't circulating as well, the follower count is a little more stagnant. I also had a month where all of my clients actually had declines in their followers, like across the board, all of my clients.
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[00:07:23] And so it is interesting to just make note of that progress. So after I grab my follower count, I head over to my analytics and look at my impressions. Now, when you go into your analytics, you'll notice that your impressions default to all impressions, organic and paid. And so if you have ever run an ad campaign at any point and you're just interested in how your pins are performing organically,
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[00:08:18] versus seeing 1 million impressions on an account that's pinning 50 fresh pins a day. So the main thing to watch for when you're writing down your number of impressions is you're looking for a huge decline in your numbers that doesn't match up with the season because we know, especially in the TPT space, that seasonal swings are very common.
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[00:09:08] Yes, it's exciting to see that my pins are circulating, and my impression number is getting higher the more I pin, that's a great temperature gauge. But overall for me, mostly it's just watching for red flags. And then that leads me to the final number that I write down from my Pinterest analytics, and that would be the outbound clicks.
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[00:10:25] I don't really record anything. I do pull that report, just so that I have that data, because like we've talked about in a previous episode, Pinterest does not hold that pin specific data for I think longer than six months, I believe. And so it's good to just grab a CSV of that if you'd like.
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[00:11:11] And so once I have been able to get that specific information that I want from Google Search Console, and then from Pinterest, it's time to dive into Google Analytics. Now, I'm gonna tell you a little secret just between you and me, I actually don't spend a ton of time in Google Analytics. I get the information that I need from Google Search Console and Pinterest Analytics because I just feel like the information is more specific.
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[00:12:01] You're able to break things down and look at things like bounce rate and time spent on page and how many pages they went to each session. You're able to look at where your audience is located and it's just a lot of really helpful information.
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[00:12:41] on data day is just my number of sessions per month. And the reason I care about that one is that's just a really great summary of how many people are landing on my website according to Google, because I monetize my website through Journey by Mediavine, and I just like to make sure that my sessions are stable so that I can continue with my income through that source.
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[00:13:34] Let's say I had a huge spike. I wanna know why. So I look at my top posts and I get a feel for, you know, which post has taken off. Most of the time I would've noticed that in Google Search Console or Pinterest, like I probably already have an idea of where that came from, but sometimes it might be different. Maybe
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[00:14:26] So maybe you have done a campaign of really trying to share your blog posts in your email. You've probably used UTM codes so that you can look to see if those are successful. You can also go into your email provider and look at the stats of that email. So whatever you are doing in your business that's important to you in that season, that's what you would be looking at during data day.
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[00:15:28] And so that's what we're gonna be talking about next week is scheduling a big picture day. But for now, what I'd love for you to do is open that fresh planner of yours and jot down when your next data day is going to be. In my business, I like to look at my numbers on the first Monday of every month.
