Episode Transcript
Nina Huchthausen (00:04.322)
All right, welcome everyone to the Make His Business Try podcast. My name is Nina and in this week's episode, I got Brooke with me. Brooke from Pen Analytics. Brooke is hailing from beautiful Perth, where it's probably even hotter from, comparison to where I'm at, even though you're wearing a sweater, but for me, I feel like Perth is always hot. And Brooke,
is one of our, not just one of our latest makers business tribe partners, but she's also a lady who loves data, which to me that doesn't happen often because data is often called this like nerdy space. It's a space that gives a lot of people a lot of anxiety and people are like, my gosh, I was never good in math. So of course I'm not going to understand data.
math, chemistry, physics, my goodness, like I'd rather run for the hills than actually wanting to delve deeper into this. But this is also a space that is so important for every single business owner to understand because data gives us insights, data gives us direction, and data can give us some really good signposts in showing
where to invest our time into and where it's actually just a completely freaking waste of time. And as my assumption is, we are all business owners who got no time, who got no money to just waste and who got no patience to just keep tapping in the dark and throwing shit against the wall and see what sticks. I thought, hey, bro, let's have a conversation.
and see how you can make this topic a little bit more tasty because I'm sure we don't just have to boil data down like Brussels sprouts in water that fricking stinks and nobody wants to eat, but we can make it tasty in the oven with some bacon and oil and salt and make it fricking delicious. So can we do that today, Brooke? We can do that today. That is absolutely what we can do. Thank you. Awesome.
Nina Huchthausen (02:28.03)
Brooke, so good to have you on this conversation. First things first, can you please introduce yourself and share a little bit of who you are, what you do and how you got here today? Absolutely. For those who don't know me, my name is Brooke Huckabee. I am the founder and head marketing analytics strategist at Pen Analytics, which is a marketing consultancy. I try to stay away from the word agency.
one-on-one or in group situations with marketing specialists or small business owners to help you better understand what's working, not working, where the opportunities in your marketing lie, and to help you get a handle on marketing data. My background is that I have been in marketing for 12 years with eight of those years focused in analytics. So when I moved into analytics first, I actually focused in operational and inventory and financial analytics where I kind of, knew
I suppose step back, I was the marketer who wanted to know what was working. I wanted to know which of our marketing activities were resonating and what messaging was working for us, what channels were reaching our audience to have them come through our pipeline to then convert. But I just didn't know where to look. There were so many metrics. There was so much in Google Analytics that I was overwhelmed. And I would spend so much time in there trying to work it out. And then I would end up just leaving and going back into my Excel spreadsheet and trying to bring raw data in and
It was just all too much when I was trying to do a full-time marketing job. But I knew the value that sat in the data. just wish I knew, at that point in my career, I just wish I knew what to look at. And I just didn't. So I decided to kind of pivot and switch and focus in on analytics. I've always been a data nerd. I've always loved data. I've always spent time in spreadsheets. I would say I probably spend hours a day in an Excel.
not just for analyzing data and information. I brain dump ideas into Excel. I use it to take notes. I just love it. So it was such a natural progression for me to move into the analytics space. But I spent my first two years in analytics really learning about data structures, queries. I was working for Australia's largest automotive group at the time. And they tasked me with the role after I showed interest in data and analytics of building out their data infrastructure for
Nina Huchthausen (04:53.166)
inventory and sales and operations so they could understand operational performance and inventory what vehicles should they be buying and using data to inform those decisions. So it was a really deep dive into the deep end and I just had to learn really quickly but I was surrounded by incredible developers and system analysts who really guided me and helped me understand
analytics, data, how to bring data sets together, how to code, just all these really cool things. And I fell in love with data. Two years later, I moved into, moved back to marketing and I've been focusing in marketing analytics ever since. And that knowledge and that skillset that I built has just, you know, taken me through to where I am today to really hone into helping now marketing specialists and small businesses understand, you know,
where to focus their time, effort, and money in marketing, what metrics to be looking at, because not all metrics are created equal, and we don't need to be looking at the hundreds and hundreds that are available. It's about getting really focused on understanding what's relevant to you and your business, and what's gonna move the needle? What's gonna make a difference in your business? What's gonna answer the question of, why don't I have enough sales? Why isn't my marketing activities driving people to my website?
What's not working? What should I be doing? And your data informs those decisions. So I help small business owners and marketing specialists understand what's working in their marketing, what's not, and what those incredible opportunities are that maybe they didn't think of or they haven't used or focused their time and effort in. I suppose the reason I named the business Pen and Lytics is because data is often so overwhelming, and it is something that
human nature when something is so, when something is considered hard or feels hard, we avoid it. So I wanted my audience and my clients and anyone that I spoke to, to see analytics the way I saw it, which is it should be empowering. It should give you confidence and it should be fun when you dive in and you go, my God, that's working. That's the channel that drives my most sales or leads or this is what drives the most awareness to fill my top of funnel. And so pen in pen analytics is my
Nina Huchthausen (07:13.08)
Beautiful corgi Penelope, Penny. And she's fun and she's confident and she's sassy and she has such a vibe about her. And that's how want people to feel about analytics because it should be all of those things. love that. I love that because at the end of the day, I why me included, I used to shy away from data too because first of all, when data came out, it was like,
or Google Analytics started becoming a thing. I for me, first time I heard about it in 2012 when I was working for an agency and I was like, I don't know what this means. And it didn't look very good. It felt very confusing, right? And that creates overwhelm. And it's always like when we don't know something, it feels very overwhelming and overwhelm slows us down. And as business owners, I don't need slowing down.
I don't need someone to crush my confidence. I need to feel I'm in control. I need to feel like I'm doing something. I need to feel like I'm achieving something. And you want the tools to help you do that. And when something like Google Analytics feels overwhelming and you don't know what to look at or where to go straight away,
you instantly disengage and you instantly go, I'll do that later. And what happens is it ends up in that too hard basket that you never come back to because you have so many other things on your plate. As a small business owner, you wear so many hats. So if something is too hard or has a barrier, just like in our customers, customer experience on our website. So when they're dealing with us as a brand, when something feels too hard or there's a barrier, we drop off, we disengage and analytics is the same.
Yeah. And I guess also, you know, if I if I hear a word that sounds complex and I can't put a value onto it because that's my next question, you know, how would I know that it would actually help me if I understood it? Yeah. So I'm curious to hear like what is tell me a story. I would love to hear a story of
Nina Huchthausen (09:36.75)
a couple of your clients that maybe were in that typical board of like analytics, what data, what I didn't, you know, I don't even know I have data to being on top of the game. Like what changed? What was the journey like for them? I think it starts with.
really defining what you want to achieve because you can't measure something that you haven't defined success on. So what does success mean in your business? If you're looking to increase revenue and maintain profit margins, if you're looking to build awareness, you know, we always have to come back to that main business goal of what you want to achieve. Your marketing objectives will move the needle to get you there and they define and tell us what we need to measure. So if you're an e-commerce business and I've worked with e-commerce businesses before where
They just, the question is, or the statement is, I just, don't know why I'm not getting enough sales on my website. And it's that their website's not working in the most optimal way it can. So when we configured their data and we enabled e-commerce metrics in there, so they can start to see cart abandonment, sorry, they can start to see cart, add to cart, right through to transaction being completed and checkout processed. We had a look at their data and we could see that
Their cart abandonment rate was over 60%. So if you think about a 60 % or above cart abandonment rate, and in 2024, cart abandonment globally sits at 70 % as an average in the APAC region. So Australia, Asia, it's sitting at 82%, which is higher than the global average. And if you're not looking at that metric of what is my cart abandonment rate, so that's somebody that adds an item to their cart on your e-commerce website.
and then they don't check out because for whatever reason they've gotten busy. We know the average, or I know the average car abandonment rate is higher on mobile. I see that consistently across my clients' websites, but it's also an industry benchmark. Smart Insights, if you're looking for great industry benchmarks to measure your performance against, they're a great course. But my client, they weren't generating sales, but they were having a lot of items added to their car. So what we found was that
Nina Huchthausen (11:53.996)
as people were moving through their checkout process or adding an item to cart, their time on their website, they were exiting after that point. Why? Because checkout process was too long. They weren't offering guest checkout and they were bringing in shipping costs too late in the process. And they were the three core things that were happening that we made tweaks to that we, sorry, that increased their overall website conversion. So they went from about 60 % and they got that down to 48%.
meant for their bottom line was that at an average order value of say $80, they were able to increase their sales by, you know, say, I can't remember the exact figure of how many more sales they got. But, you know, if you're taking from a 60 % drop off rate down to 48%, that could mean an extra $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 in your pocket every week. We just need to know what your average order value is and how much you know, how you're building that. But
That's how you make incremental changes. And that's how you see so much more impact in your business from an e-commerce brand is starting with those top level metrics of what are my conversion rates at each stage of my pipeline? What's actually happening? Where are people dropping off? We then look to get even more specific once they got their average order, I'm sorry, their cut abandonment rate down. We then looked, okay, now we've optimized your checkout process. Now we're going to look at optimizing your marketing tactics.
to bring people back into your pipeline of people that are dropping off prior to checking out, what marketing activities can you use? So for them, we implemented cart abandonment emails, which you can do through Shopify really simply, connected to your email system. We were bringing people back into their pipeline. We've all had that email, have you forgotten something in your cart? And those kind of email nurture tracks are really, really successful in bringing people back into your pipeline.
keeping your brand top of mind and, you know, ideally nurturing them through to purchasing not just the product they were looking at, but additional items that the second tactic was, okay, once we get the email sequence set up to bring people back, what's the product telling us about what people are buying? So if someone's buying one particular product, so in this case, it was people were buying yoga mats, what products are they gonna be buying? So we saw that.
Nina Huchthausen (14:18.018)
People that are buying yoga mats are also buying drink bottles. Of course, they all go hand in hand. They're also buying leggings and tights. So let's start to serve relevant content that we can either bundle together or we can say, other people who purchase this also purchase this you might be interested too. And it brought the average order value up. So without having to go out and do a whole heap of advertising to fill top of funnel, we focused on building and nurturing our current funnel and just bringing people back.
improving our experience and making it more personalized so that people felt like they were being seen and heard and, I'm interested in this too. And that's kind of the key is that's your starting point. You don't just go and throw more money at advertising. You look at what you're currently doing and you try to improve and optimize on it. And that's what your data does. Your data helps you see those areas where there are maybe barriers or pain points in your user experience.
So you can improve that. And that's how we got the cart abandonment down in the first instance. And then the next step is what marketing tactics are going to support us to better nurture this audience. And then once you've got that all humming and working, then we go back to looking at, OK, how do we fill that top of funnel? And our data then tells the story of, OK, where is our audience coming from to build awareness of people who make their way through our pipeline and go through to a conversion?
What's the first way that those people come to our website? And that's how we get. So before we delve into that, just to summarize. So the first thing that you did with this client was you looked at their website. Yes. And then what I would assume, to help for everybody to see this. you looked at their website, but you didn't just look at it from an end user's perspective, like you and me, but you
then logged into the back end. And you set up certain elements that would give you information about what was happening on the page, how long you would be started to track, how long people stayed on the page, where they were dropping off, and what was happening. And that would feed into some, into, I would assume, a dashboard so that you could see and make sense of those data points. And then you would start drawing insights from it.
Nina Huchthausen (16:38.624)
And so I always say start top level. Your first step is your pipeline as an overarching and your key conversion points. Which of those conversion points are too low? Or if it's a drop off rate, which of those drop off rates are too high? If people are, and that's what we saw with the card abandonment, we had a really high card abandonment rate. And yes, it was below industry average, but industry average is high. So there was room for, there was room and opportunity in that.
cart abandonment rate that we thought, we can bring this down. We can get smarter. We can get more optimized. These people that are adding an item to their cart, they're showing intent. They're showing interest. And then they're dropping off. They're an opportunity. I think it's something like $3 trillion in the e-commerce market sits with cart abandonment every single year. It's wild. And if you're not focusing on your pipeline and your conversions of your user experience and your buyer's journey,
then you're missing so many opportunities. And that's the starting point. Look at those top level conversions and drop off points and identify how are you performing? Where is there an opportunity? What are the top five points to look at on my website? Yeah. So if you're e-commerce, you are starting with your checkout process. You are looking at of people who add an item to cart. So starting with cart abandonment, that's key.
into your checkout process because there is always room for optimization in that checkout process. Key points that people see, and I actually have a really great blog on my website, which is the top 12 areas to focus in on if you notice that you have a high cart abandonment rate, but it seems like you might not have the right trust signals in place to nurture people through. So they've added an item to cart, but they may not have fully decided that they want to buy that item, but they need it. It's solving some kind of problem that they have.
But you don't have enough testimonials or reviews along your checkout process and that exit process for them to actually purchase it. They're still seeking a little bit of social proof and they need those trust signals. The most common is the additional cost of shipping being brought in too late in the process. You want to bring shipping costs in earlier or you want to find a way to work your shipping costs in to the price of your product or a portion of those shipping costs into a price of the product.
Nina Huchthausen (19:05.676)
because people are always looking for low shipping costs. You're looking for guest checkouts, a massive one that we see. If you don't offer guest checkout and people have to sign in, give you all their details during that checkout process, that creates an additional barrier and level that most people just go, don't have time for this. I'll come back and do it later. And they truly intend to, but the likelihood is that they don't. I mean, I've been sitting in a couple of checkout processes
trying to be organized for Christmas for my kids in the last few days. And I still have not checked out because I need to sign in and I need to create a profile. And I'm like, I'll just do that later. I'm on mobile and I can, I can just come back to that. And I haven't. Will I? Maybe. There are times where I don't. It might be until December and I think, my God, I still need to get those things. But we want to capture people in those earlier stages. So we want to make the process as easy as possible.
e-commerce, if we're looking at those top five, that is the starting point. But then you want to look at things like, what are people doing on product details pages? How long are they spending? What are they looking at? What are they interacting with? Maybe scroll depth of how far people are scrolling down. And this is all the type of configuration when we hear our analytics that we want to get set up. We just want to know from that top of funnel, what are we looking at? Those conversion points.
Then we go into within those conversion points, what do we need to look at? If it's between awareness and consideration, we're looking at how do people get to our website? What channels did they come from? If it's between consideration and decision making, we're looking at engagement metrics. How long are people staying on our website? How engaged are they? What pages are they looking at? What products are they looking at or potentially searching?
And then between decision and conversion, that's your cart abandonment. Are people adding items to cart? Once they add an item to cart, what are they doing? Are they dropping off? Are they moving through the process? Where are the pain points? Where are they spending? Where do we see long lagging, lag times? And just understanding your best pathway to conversion, where the barriers are, that's key. And if you can really hone in and optimize that.
Nina Huchthausen (21:23.566)
you'll be in such a better position to drive traffic and drive people to your website to then take the actions you want them to take. Awesome. But how do I do that? Because like, like probably most of of our listeners, might have, they might have worked with the developer to set up their website, right? They set up in Shopify, WooCommerce and they're, they end up there.
they're in the process of selling away and maybe they get more more comfortable logging into the back end to make a few tweaks to their prices or their product pages. But where do I look? Where do I start to find this information? So you start with looking at what you want to achieve. So as an e-commerce business, you're likely going to have goals around, want to make a revenue, I want to increase sales.
And you want to know, is my business goal? I can't tell you what your business goal is. But once you define what you're looking to achieve, which will likely be revenue and profit based, then we know, OK, we need to increase sales. We need to build awareness around the brand. The starting point from an analytics standpoint is really defining what you're looking to achieve, because then we can look at, OK, what do we need to measure to make sure you achieve that? OK, let's make a practical.
I set a 20K of sales a month and then want to get that up to 30K in the next six months. Cool. So then we look at, okay, you're looking at a revenue goal. We want to get, we want to look at defining some smart marketing objectives that are measurable. So there's a process that, a methodology that we go through. The starting point is I went through a five-step framework. So the first step is setting that exactly, setting your goal, setting your smart marketing objectives.
I want to increase revenue from, want to achieve 20, sorry, $30,000 in revenue over the next three months per month, which means I need to generate X amount of sales and I need to drive X amount of traffic to my website. And this is where it gets a bit overwhelming for some people is the math side and working backwards, but it is not hard and it doesn't have to be hard. If I pause it there for a moment, my advice is once you've defined your smart objective,
Nina Huchthausen (23:43.586)
That tells you the metrics you need to track. That tells you the tools you need. I can tell you as an e-commerce business owner, you probably need to be looking at having Google Analytics set up on your website as a starting point and a baseline is the first thing that you do. Then we want to look at something like e-commerce enablement configured through Google Tag Manager. So if I look at two key analytics platforms, Google Analytics collects all your data. It's where you can kind of see it. It can feel very
because there's a lot of different areas to Google Analytics. I'll come to that in a sec. Google Tag Manager is where you can figure, I want to track cart checkout. I want to track item removed from cart. want to check each stage of my funnel I want to track. And I want to check out revenue volumes and average order value and that type of thing. OK, so just to pause you right there. Because, you know,
I think for a lot of small business owners, they might not, because a developer builds your site most of the time, right? And they might say, yep, this package included Google Analytics. So first thing, what you just said was like, it's not, you don't find this data in Shopify. You get this data out of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
Meaning those are, think that as a starting point, if you want to get into your own data or take ownership of it, very first step baseline is make sure you've got your login details to Google Analytics and to Tag Manager and that that's actually set up to start tracking information. Definitely. Because I would say hand to hand, most people don't know this. Completely. And Shopify is great and it's a
really great CRM to give you data around your product. So from a dimension standpoint, we talk around, OK, well, what products are purchased together? What products are our most common purchased products? And some people will agree or disagree with me on this. Shopify, to me, is quite a siloed platform. It gives you a lot, but it doesn't give you the full picture. Google Analytics, when you structure it correctly, not just shows you
Nina Huchthausen (26:00.248)
how many sales you've had, how much revenue you've generated, what your average order value is. It feeds in what marketing channels have driven those sales, what marketing channels drive your order. And that's what starts to really inform the story. And it starts to paint the picture of what your buyer's journey looks like. And that's when you can start to focus your time, efforts, and money in specific areas. I don't have enough people coming to my website.
to make the purchase volumes that I need to make, to hit my revenue number. And when we, if I go back to when we were talking about defining smart objectives, it's quite, it's a methodology, it's a framework and it's a process, but I work backwards, I reverse engineer. So when I talk about benchmarks, they're really important. You have your industry benchmarks that you're, that gauge how you're sitting and fairing from a competition standpoint and with other people in industry.
The second type of benchmark that I set is you have your own benchmarks. And we need to have Google Analytics set up on your website so you can understand how much traffic is coming through to your website, how many sales are you making. So at a top level, you can see this is my overall conversion rate. We can get more specific. But to start with, to define your smart objective, we want to know of people coming to your website in the last three months, how many people are purchasing? Say that's 2%, for example.
In 2024, the average e-commerce conversion rate on a website from people landing on your page to converting for purchase is 3 5%. That's considered good. A lot of clients that I start working with, when they start, they're at 1 % or lower. And that's why we need to drill in and understand, what's happening? You're driving traffic to your website, but why aren't people purchasing?
When we look at defining that smart objective, we take our benchmark of 2 % and we say, OK, well, I know I need to generate $30,000 in revenue if that's our goal. And based on $30,000 in revenue, if I'm, how many sales do I need? So you look at something like your average order value and say my average order value is $1,000. I'm going to say that because it's easy to math against. I go, OK, well, I need 30 sales a month to get $30,000.
Nina Huchthausen (28:17.986)
Great. Okay. At 30 sales a month, how many people do I need to get to my website? You take your 2 % benchmark and you go $30,000 divided by 2%, sorry, 30 sales divided by 2 % and that will give you your number of people you need to get to your website and that's your visitors. Now there's a lot of things within that that certain channels will bring higher value customers or visitors to your website.
So that percentage rate and that conversion rate will tweak, but you will take more learnings from that over time. We're starting with a top level smart objective that tells us the metrics we need to look at. All of a sudden, we know we need to look at the number of sales we're making on our website, because that's one of our key areas in our objective. need look at the revenue that we're generating. So we know that that's $30,000. We've set that in our smart objective. We know we need to look at the number of visitors coming to our website.
We've set that in our smart objective. We know we need to look at our average order value because we've set that. That's gone into coming up with our smart objective. It is a process, but once you've got this framework in front of you, and that's what I work with my clients on, it's a five-step framework, define your goal and smart marketing objectives, your metrics and your dimensions come out of that of what you're looking for then. Then you go to tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
We configure what you need to collect to make sure you're collecting it. Then we go to step four. We create a dashboard. I always say dashboards are the MVP of marketing analytics because they mean that you can go in there. You can see all those metrics rather than sifting through Google Analytics and trying to work it all out. You go into your dashboard and they're all there on one line, a couple of funnels. You can see it and you go, well, I know I had to get 60,000 people to my website to get 30 sales, but I'm in a
whatever that works out to be a day. So you need to generate 100 people per day. It'll be more than that. But say that your threshold is still target is 100 people per day, but you're averaging 50 people per day. Okay, I have an issue. If your conversion rate per month or per week needs to be 2 % to get that, and you're only getting 1%, okay, what do I drill into? It's all of these key indicators that sit in one page of a dashboard that you can see within less than a minute and go, well, I'm not hitting that. I am hitting that, right?
Nina Huchthausen (30:40.898)
but I'm not hitting that. Okay, my cut abandonment rate has gone up. I'm going to drill into that. And when you're hearing about it like this for the first time, you're like, my brain hurts. That sounds like so much. But the framework allows you to take this step by step approach. And it just makes so much sense when you do it like that, because once you've got your dashboard and you're able to do that daily or weekly analysis, then you can move into step five of, now I'm testing, I'm learning, I'm optimizing.
I'm trying different things. I'm tweaking my checkout process to bring my cart abandonment rate down. I'm going to go on, let's just say Meta Ads, for example, because I know that Meta Ads fills my top of funnel and the customers that come first from Meta Ads with the support of other marketing channels, because we know that no marketing channel works in silo, they convert to a sale. They have a quality rating to convert to a sale.
And you build this picture over time, but the starting point is defining that clear goal and objective, pulling out those metrics and knowing that you need to configure some things in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. That's where we start. And then all the goodness of diving into it comes from there. Now, I always say, if you want to start manually, definitely do it. Go into Shopify or Google Analytics and look at how many website visitors you've had come to your website in the last three months on average.
look at what the monthly average is, look at the monthly sales you've made over the last three months, and work out your conversion rate. You can do that without having anything configured and just having either Google Analytics on your website or using your Shopify insights. From there, you can go, well, my conversion rate's sitting at, let's hypothetically say 0.5, but I know industry average is 3 to 5%. Okay, I need some help in this area. I need to do something. I don't know what it is that I need to do yet.
but I need to go and speak to someone or I need to take the next step. That's where I would start is just manually calculate your conversion rate. Visitors on website to sales, work out where that sits and then the next step will fall out of that. Awesome. Now, whilst you were talking and I think you just shared so much information, but I can also feel quite overwhelmed like all these lingo and terms.
Nina Huchthausen (33:06.306)
really that are floating around, but really based on the story that I heard of what you just shared with me is that you are really
the queen of helping me get my business from A to B. So it's already running. I got some sales going. I build out a bit of a marketing ecosystem. So I might be doing social media. I might be doing ads, some email marketing, and I got it to 20K a month. But now I want to grow it. But I don't just want to throw shit against the wall and do all sorts of random things. I want to go about it.
in a way that I hopefully spend as little money, as little time as possible and get to that goal, not in three years time by luck and chance, but having a guide on my side, that can kind of strategically move me there. Definitely. So really, in my mind, the picture that you painted, it's not so much becoming friends with data and analytics, but becoming friends with
All right, I got to go. Let me do this the smart way versus saying, yeah, I want to grow my business. OK, let me just work harder in all areas. More posts, more emails, more this. Let me do a competition. Let's do all these random things in the hopes something will do something. Or I just keep running more discounts. You're saying like, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah.
Here's what we can do. We define the overarching goal and then we break that down into things that are leading indicators. If we hit those, they will help us ultimately get more cash in the bank. Exactly. And once we have that, then we strategically and we can either do it ourselves, YouTubing it all the way through or work with someone like you defining, well, what are just a few areas
Nina Huchthausen (35:16.65)
in our website, in our social media, in our email marketing, in our ads, Google search, whatever it is that you do, that we need to start tracking and looking at to see where could we do more, less, or better. Exactly. And then strategically, we just do that.
have shiny object syndrome and just jump on social media and hop into some business Facebook group and say, I want to make more sales. How do I make more sales? And listen to like 90 people who commenting and throw some random advice that might've worked for them. you're saying, well, then let's find the key data nuggets and let ourselves guided by it and then derive
a strategy that can help you tweak those metrics.
Yeah, and it is a test and learn and optimize. You're not going to get it first off the bat, but we need to trial different things because we're likely trialing them anyway. We just don't know whether they're working or not working. And our data, it's not the be all and end all, and it's not going to solve every problem under the sun, but it's going to inform us to make better decisions, more focused. It's going to allow us to be more focused in our marketing and see, okay, well,
I know when I turn on this channel to drive awareness and I know when I then have email running and I know when I have retargeting going and personalized emails that my conversion rate either goes up or it maintains. And we start to tell the story of what is our ideal channel mix? What is our ideal channel mix that works at each stage of our buyer's journey? And then we can tweak and optimize. So these kind of like these two prongs, you've got your buyer's journey and your channel mix.
Nina Huchthausen (37:18.22)
What's working? And we've got our website, our store, it's our source of truth. And that's where people are purchasing. And we want to make sure that's running as optimally as possible. And our data will inform where to focus our time efforts and money. And I always say, start with your website. It's there. And if you're driving and you're spending time, and money driving people there and it's not working, you're wasting your time. So make sure that your website's working.
and then drive more people there to test it. See what happens. You can A-B test, so that means you're giving two slightly different experiences on your website. And you can see what one works better and then funnel everything into that. You can do the same with your marketing. Try two different types of messaging to see what engages people, what hooks people in, what makes them click that button and come through to your website.
and then focus in on that message, because that is the message that's resonating with your audience and your data tells you that. So there's so many things you can do. But again, I always say start, start at a top level. Understand your website and what's working on your website, and then look at your channels and what's working, and then take that next step to a world of personalization and making sure that in all of your content that you're putting out, whether
it's directly going to someone through email, it's personalized. So if you have an email list that you're personalizing that email list and you're segmenting and tagging people, so you're grouping and categorizing people as per how they're interacting with you, what they're purchasing. So if you bring in a new product and you're like, well, this is really relevant to category A because they've already bought similar things and this complements that. well, I'm going to just send an email out to them and say, hey, guys, we've got this awesome new product in.
you're going to love it because we know that you've bought products that are really similar in the past. And that's a really cost effective, low effort way to get some initial sales and start bringing people from a retention standpoint. Cause that's another really cool metric to look at. Just because remembering people might hear it from the first time. Totally. So retention is someone's already purchased from you.
Nina Huchthausen (39:34.584)
How do we keep them coming back and buying more? How do we keep them as a loyal customer? Someone like Mecca, who I talk about all the time, has the Beauty Loop loyalty program. As a retailer, they have nailed the loyalty program world. Their program is studied globally. And it's one of those things that if you can keep people coming back, we know existing customers, and this is what the data shows us. When people have bought from you once,
they have a higher conversion rate to come back and buy from you again than you having to cost new customers. They have a lower cost per acquisition because they're already in your ecosystem. when you look at obviously wanting to continue to fill that funnel and build awareness about your brand and bring new people into your pipeline, there also has to be a focus on your current customer base and looking at how do we keep bringing them back if you're a skincare
line. And you know that people's frequency of usage of a face cleanser or face moisturizer is 6 weeks. Well, then you should have them on some kind of 6-weekly sequence that you're bringing your brand back top of mind when they're due to renew. And that goes across any product where you could be, have a renewal rate. Knowing the frequency that people buy from you, knowing the return rate of people is really important, because that's what keeps revenue higher. And then we use
personalised experiences to increase that average order value. If I go back and I'm like, I need my, need more of that cleanser. And then at the same time, I go in to buy my cleanser and they're like, hey, you might also be interested in this face moisturiser. I'm like, Yes, yes, I am. Or this face scrubber thing. I'm like, Yes, I am. And if you buy this, maybe you get a certain percentage off. There are different techniques, tactics. There are so many, but just things to consider and not just always trying to get new customers.
existing customer base is probably so much more valuable to you to keep bringing them back in. And yeah, loyalty programs, there are different incentives you can give them, but keep it as simple as just have different nurture tracks and email sequences to keep talking to them, keep giving them value-adding information. Don't always try to sell to them. We know that content that is educational or value-adding, like, you know,
Nina Huchthausen (42:00.654)
here's a morning skin routine. I have a client who's a skin clinic and they're incredible and they sit both on the service side and a product because they have an online store. And so, you know, it's all about not just selling to someone consistently. How do you tell a story? How do you make someone invested in your brand? And that's giving them value and that's telling them, hey, you know, if you do this skin routine, it's great. But also these are the products we use for our skin routines.
that brings in that buying pattern and that incentive to purchase. I mean, I could talk about this stuff all day. I get so excited. I think there's just so many things that data leads you into to be able to improve your experiences, but also to highlight, hey, I've been focusing too much on new customers. And I know that's important, but my retention rates really low. So I'm actually not bringing my existing customers back to purchase. What can I do?
And exactly as you were saying, you were talking about a lot of metrics, a lot of steps to do, a lot of things that we can pull from it. But I think the gist of it is this is smart. This is smart. And the reason why I like it, because if I could, I would just want to sit by the beach or doing in subpoena collage.
So, well, not everybody does. There a lot of people who are like, I pride myself on saying I'm always busy, I work so hard, but you keep crashing and burning, you know? Like, hand to hand. There's nobody that I know who's like, who can do that consistently. And at some point, we'll ask ourselves, why the fuck do I keep doing this? Why do I keep working so hard? So to me,
This is even though maybe for most people is like, cool, okay, she said all of this stuff, all of these metrics, all the things that I could do, but for me, it's just smashing our brains. But the gist of it is when you start getting, when you can allow you, when you set yourself that very first goal, like I'm not here to just work hard and to keep burning the midnight oil, but I wanna.
Nina Huchthausen (44:19.352)
do this smarter, and I'm keen to understand which levers to pull to get my business into the right direction, meaning getting full control over this engine that I've been building, then data could be a really good step to look into. But it's not all random data. It's not a whole mountain that we need to sift through that makes us sick.
but it's just a few data points that you help people identify based on the goal. And then it can be very simple because how many data points are we actually talking on average that you look at with your customer? Just so we understand. Yeah, five to 10. Five to 10 data points max. And then we may drill into some other ones, but top level five to 10. Easy. Anyone can understand five to 10.
data points, you know, if you learn one data point a day, keep a low boiling, you know, you one a day to understand in 10 days, you understand them all. Absolutely. And if you could look at one, like as an e-commerce store, can just one and go, I'm just going to hone in on this one. And the most value adding data point for an e-commerce store is that card abandonment rate. And then if you go, actually mine's really low, then you move on to the next. And
you look at your overall website conversion and you make sure your website's working. And you can take a real step-by-step approach, but it's exactly that. You just need a starting point and you need to get it to a point where you can see that data. And when you can't see it, I always say your data is right in front of you. You just need to surface it. It's there, it's working, but it's not helping your business until you actually start to bridge that gap between here's the data and insight.
and then taking action and testing and trialing different things. And I like to share a lot of information, not to overwhelm, but to seed ideas and to different people will respond differently to discussions around, know, retention or, or card abandonment rates. And they'll go, well, I really want to focus in on here first. And that's really great. But it's also like, well, let's have a look at that overarching pipeline and let's see where you need to focus first, because you might already be doing really great from a retention. And so it's not your priority.
Nina Huchthausen (46:42.478)
Analytics to remove the overwhelm, we need to have a hierarchy of priorities, and you can't look at everything at once. And if you tried to, you will, you will never get the value out of your data that you seek to get. And so that's really important. And that's, that's why, where I kind of come in is I, I help people build out their framework so they're able to jump into a dashboard for less than five minutes a day and then go, well, I'm doing really well, or
actually know I need to focus in on this. And then they've got their next steps from that. The analysis is, a whole section in itself that allows you to take a step-by-step approach. But we have to surface it. We have to start from a top level, and we have to look at basic metrics that align to our goals and marketing objectives. And then we can go in from there. But, I mean, if that's all you looked at is your top-level metrics for the next six months, you will see improvements. Because
You have direction and you have a guidance on what to focus in on. You can then test different approaches. Analytics is very assumption based. So we go, well, again, I'll say kind of abandoned because it's so relevant to e-commerce. Kind of abandoned is so high. I assume I have an issue with my checkout process. So then you'll have a look at your checkout process and you'll say, well, when people get to shipping costs, that's where they're, that's the page they're exiting on. Okay. What next?
And you can go, OK, well, I'm going to bring it back in earlier, or I'm going to work it into my product costs, or I'm going to look at how I can get, tighten up my shipping costs. Maybe I don't need to be charging $20 for shipping on an item that weighs 500 grams. I've had a blanket approach, but now I'm going to do my shipping based on actual weight distribution and what a shipping cost is. I think someone buying a heavier item would make the assumption that shipping might be high out, you know, and trying to get a bit smarter. But your data guides you there.
And that's the really cool thing about your data. And your data, guess, it doesn't rule out assumptions, but it's not that you are starting from a blank slate, but it shows you, it kind of shines the light on an issue. And then you can try out different tactics that people might recommend to try out, but you can hone in, you can zoom in. So it's not just
Nina Huchthausen (49:07.894)
my God, I need to climb Mount Everest, but I have no idea like where the direction leads to. It's almost like putting a pin into a map at a certain point in time. And you're like, here might be the issue. Yeah. Let's play with it. You know, had a client who was driving a lot of traffic to the website that nobody was getting to their product details pages. So nobody was even seeing their products. And when we looked at their
user experience on their website and their page navigation and how people flow through to that shop section of their website. There was, they weren't sending people directly to specific products, even in ads. So if someone, they were advertising, you know, a book, they weren't being sent to that specific page. So that's like, if you advertise something, you're sending someone directly to that, don't send them to your homepage.
If you're sending them to a non-shop page, make sure there is a clear button for them to get to the shop section or the search section. And this is what they might have. They didn't have the flow through experience. And while it might seem so obvious, sometimes when you're in something so much and you live and breathe your business, you live and breathe your website, you don't see what someone from an outside perspective sees or your data highlights something.
Sometimes it can be a bit confronting, like, don't want to look at my data because I don't want to know I've been doing the wrong thing for the past two years. And I shouldn't say wrong thing because it's not the wrong thing. It's just there are other opportunities to improve it. I always say, especially when I work with, marketing specialists, it's this fear of failure. Well, I don't want to be shown that I haven't known what I've been doing or that maybe the marketing that I've been engaging with isn't working. I always go back to, shouldn't be, I'm going to fail. This has been a failure. Nothing's ever a failure.
If you've been able to collect data on it, it is so insightful to know what you can do or where you can focus your time. Remove the idea of any of, you know, that I've failed if it hasn't worked before, because we're only looking at a point now moving forward and where those opportunities are. You know, what's not working? Cool. I love knowing, I love knowing what's not working because I go, okay, well, let's redirect, let's refocus, let's reallocate budget.
Nina Huchthausen (51:28.748)
And let's try this because we can see that this looks like it could be working. But let's move away from this section because this is proven not to be working in the past. And I think that it's a mind shift change as well. Yeah. So how do you then help me work smarter and not harder and get to my goal? how can people work with you? They're like, I want to...
move from 20 to 30K and no, I don't want to work weekends on this. And no, I don't want to spend all my money on this. It's just getting you started, getting you set up. So I run two kind of, I suppose, tiers to my offerings. I have a done for you service where we have a workshop and I understand your needs, your requirements. I develop out your based on your business goals, what your smart objectives are. Then I can figure your analytics accordingly.
And then I build your dashboard and then we do a handover session. So I've done the base of the work for you and then you've got the data there to then take and we analyze it recommendations. We have an initial handover session. Then a month later, we have another session where we do analysis. There is another tier above that where I, you know, we have a six month retainer on the back of that where every month for six months, I'm there. I'm in your pocket. I help you with your analysis.
And we have an action plan that comes out of every month, where you go away during that month and you make slight tweaks. We come back and we analyze what happened and we look at, OK, what are, what are the changes we're making next? Where are we focusing this month? And that's kind of, that's the done-for-you service. Then there's the done-with-you service, which I've actually just, Monday this week, opened doors for, so it's really exciting, my November intake. And that's a one-to-one coaching. I'm really big on empowerment and enabling my clients, even in my done-for-you service.
to self-serve. And that's why I'm there as a support. I shouldn't always be there. That's the thing. I want you to take on some of my knowledge, and I want to transfer as much as I can, so that you're empowered within your business to be able to know what to look at. You have the resources there. So the coaching program is a 5-week program. We meet for 90 minutes, an hour and half every week. And I take you through it step by step. We define your, your measurement strategy by looking at those goals.
Nina Huchthausen (53:50.434)
those marketing objectives, we define the metrics, then we configure it. We choose the tools that you, which is Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and we get you configured appropriately for enabled e-commerce or whatever your business and comes out of the measurement plan. And then we go through to the next step of building the dashboard. I show you how to build a dashboard, how to interpret a dashboard, how to analyze it. And then we really get into some
high-level recommendations off the bat. So we go, what are we seeing? What are we looking at? Cool, let's try this. And so then we analyze. And you're set up in that five weeks with that foundation to get started. And then I can support you further. But the idea is that I want to get you started so you can and you are enabled to self-serve and do it yourself. And it's only if you need that additional support or you have questions and you want to get some help. But it's all about getting you started, getting you set up.
and just getting you into that data mindset. So you're empowered to make decisions. Your decisions in your marketing are more informed. You're not sitting there going, wish I knew where my sales were coming from, or I feel like I'm marketing for the sake of marketing. You're very strategic in your approach. You go, okay, well, I know these channels work at each stage of my pipeline and they work together. And this is the flow through that my customers take. So this is what I'm focusing on.
here's an opportunity. This worked really well, this sequence for this email. I'm going to try this slightly differently with these customers. There's so many things you can do, but you have to get started. So we start at that foundational level, getting you set up, getting those initial insights in, and then you can drill from there. And that's the starting point. Awesome. To me, that sounds freaking fantastic, because if someone can hold my hand,
to teach me how to fish, right? At my speed and get me in control. That's gold. Because it feels very overwhelming. And I know this from experience when first, when you're a first time business owner and you build an awesome product and you're loving your product, but then you start getting into the mechanics of running a business.
Nina Huchthausen (56:13.728)
and selling, especially selling online, that can feel like such a huge black box, right? And there will be so many people who tell you you should, how about you should do this? You should do that. Have you done this? How about this? How about dancing on TikTok? How about this? How about that? But if you have no idea whether that's doing anything, you could be dancing all day. You know, you need to know.
What channels are working at each stage of your funnel? Who your audience is? What messaging resonates? What type of marketing is resonating with your audience to fill each stage of that pipeline to continue to nurture people down to that conversion point that you set? And that could be an email sign up, a free resource. That could be the conversion point of a purchase. But if we don't know how our marketing is working for us as a business and we're having to spend hours working that out, we're never going to work out.
our marketing. And so the idea is let's surface it in a way that you can get started. And you can see those key top level metrics, and it could be less than five. It depends on your business and your business goals. And just get going with your marketing. Get going with, with informing decisions and playing around with it. The first three to six months of using your data is very test trial. But you will see, you will see improvements because
You're focused. Exactly. And I think that's such a big thing because focus kills overwhelm. Because when we focus, we move forward. And when we move forward, we create a sense of achievement. Whether that's an achievement in just a very leading indicator, so an indicator that maybe, know, wow, I get more people onto my product detail pages versus just saying on the home page, you know.
I can celebrate and I can be like, wow, I did that. Yeah. Okay, cool. Now broke. Okay, cool. They're still not buying. Now what's the next step? But if I only look at or wait for that Shopify thing, right? Of sales. And the only, if that's my only result measure, whether I made a sale or I didn't make a sale, that can feel quite overwhelming because there's so much that leads up.
Nina Huchthausen (58:40.814)
to actually making a sale. And I feel like if you can break that down for me, so number one, I understand first of all, first time business owner, that there are many steps on the path that we might not even see or aware of, number one. And then can shed light on where I have opportunity to refine that step and make it easier, number two. And if I can also.
learn a whole lot more about my customers and how I can best refine my messaging so it resonates with them, then you put me in control. You put me in control of like, I actually know what I'm doing because I bet you probably 90 % of people when you ask them, hand to hand in the e-comm space or anyone who sells products, you know what you're doing? Like, fuck me, I'm winging it every day. You know?
But with what you're doing, like those few tools can make such a big difference of kind of be like, yeah, I'm just doing things to make sure I'm not crashing and burning and then I get lucky versus no, I actually got an approach here. Yeah. I've got a strategy. got a direction that I'm working in. And I know that, like Friday's coming up.
It's not just an opportunity to sell. It is a gold mine of data. When you're spending time, effort and money on sending all these people to your website, you want to be knowing what they're doing. You want to, and obviously it's, it's not identifiable. It's just, what is the pathways people are taking? What is the content and the products that they're engaging with? What's happening before someone makes a purchase that we can take that information
We can tweak marketing and efforts in real time, but we can also inform what we're doing in the next six months and what our marketing strategy looks like. So that's what I say. There's like five weeks to like Friday. There's still time to configure your data and make sure that you leverage all of that goodness that's coming through to your website. Even if you haven't got an optimal website at this point, understand what people are doing, you know, understand where you can make optimizations, where those pain points are. That's your point, the starting point.
Nina Huchthausen (01:01:02.83)
where to send your developer to to make those changes for you if you don't know. Yeah. And it's always, I would say, when you're setting up a website, make sure you get your analytics set up properly. Most of the time I'm with web designers who will give me access and I will do the setup because most web developers and web designers are amazing at what they do, but their role is not to configure analytics. That's not part of their set. And analytics can't just be, or shouldn't just be added to a website. can.
But it shouldn't. There needs to be a measurement strategy around what you're looking to achieve to then collect all of the right data. Because when we don't collect the right data, we collect all the data. And it just gets overwhelming. The data will always be there. But it's not And I can say that hand to hand. That's what happened to me because I didn't know any better. they just said like, it was just like, and for most web developers, they just put that as an ad on.
No, and you want me to set up analytics for you? And then it's just everything. And then you start logging in and I was like, I'm a fucking like, I don't even know what to look at. This gives me eye cancer and I'm really busy. So X up, you know, and, and, that is not like, of course, if you are at that point, then it might just be a good thing to kind of to literally give Brooke a call and then Brooke, you help me out and simplify this? You know, I, I, I get
stomach pains when I look at it and I think because it's too much. But if you haven't set it up, then what I'm hearing is it might be good to have a conversation with you to know what needs to be set up and set it up the smart way from the start. Yeah, yeah, you need to have a in place to know what to configure. That's the most important part to that. Those first two steps. And that's where we develop it when we're defining goals and objectives and our metrics.
We develop our measurement plan within those two steps. And that tells us what we need to do next. And that's the configuration side. You could add Google Analytics to your website in the same way your developer does. And it's not figured appropriately to what you need. And that's the key. If we're going to use our data, we need to have the metrics we need configured. And we're focusing on five to 10. We're not focusing on the hundreds that are in there available.
Nina Huchthausen (01:03:27.106)
We might drill in and look at some more of those later, but to start with, we're starting top level. Yeah. Simple, focused. Yeah. I love it. So you said you're doing this intake soon, which means if anyone feels like, hey, this sounds really interesting and, my gosh, data is overwhelming to me and I haven't been looking at it and I know I've been flying blind and...
I know I shouldn't be flying blind. And if there was an opportunity, someone just like makes it that simple for me and gives me actually some direction and focus, then what can people do to have a look at what you do in more detail? You can visit my website, Penelitics.com.au. I can share the link if they can go in the show notes, that could help. But it's just to get in contact, book a...
Book a free discovery call. I do a 30-minute free call to help, you know, identify what's the right approach for you. Is it the coaching? Is it the done for you? You know, when are you ready to engage and start looking at this? Most of the businesses I work with are e-commerce businesses that are established, and they're looking to now, they think they've maybe had Google Analytics on their website, but they just don't know what's, what's actually working. So they've got some data in there. I work with businesses who don't currently have Google Analytics set up as well.
And then we have a collection phase that we need to focus on post coaching or posts are done for you to let the data flow through. But the sooner you can configure, it's basically from the moment that it's configured is when it starts collecting. Prior to that, it's just either not non-existent or it's a jumbled mess. So we want to make sure it's configured the earlier the better. And then that's kind of how you get going. So booking a call is always the first way to start. And then we get going from there.
Awesome. So meaning as soon as I'm like in the process of building a website with someone, it might be good to have a chat with you to understand the process, understand what I'm ready, understand what needs to happen for me. So you're not wasting time. Absolutely. Honestly, we have so many people come to us into the tribe who have been just wasting so much time on like trying anything and everything.
Nina Huchthausen (01:05:51.736)
You know, even though as part of the tribe, we focus on getting into retail, but retail and online go hand in glove. And the more data and insights we have of what's happening online and what's working and not working, that also translates really well into the retail space. But if nothing's set up and you've already been trying for six months, 12 months, and your confidence is down, you're doubting yourself, you might be running out of money.
because you've been trying to jump in full time too early, then all of this can really help you to stop that and change that trajectory. Because you get insights and clarity. And I feel like it's really, really important to allow yourself to
get the best chance of succeeding. And I feel like this adds to it. Because let's face it, eight in 10 businesses fail within the first two years. Yeah. Because we don't know what we're doing, where we're going. And we might just be sailing in circles. And this can really stop that. So if anyone just feels like, I'm sailing in circles or backwards, or my boat is even upside down. I'm there with the snow go all the time.
Then let's find out why. And Brooke can help you with that to give you direction. Because if nothing, the data might tell you, look, maybe there is no product market fit for this. Or maybe you need to go back to the positioning of the product. Because maybe if you're doubting whether your pricing is even right, if you are.
wondering, does anyone even want my product? Because maybe you developed it and just you wanting it. They can tell you this. Yeah, maybe you're a huge amount of people going to a product details page, but not one of those people have added it to cart. Why? And that's when you start to drill into, why isn't this product resonating? Why is there such a high drop-off rate on this product details page? What can we do? And then you might go and get some more qualitative feedback from people.
Nina Huchthausen (01:08:14.318)
tool to have a pop-up on that particular page that says, you know, or people that went off that page onto a different page, a pop-up comes up on the website to say, hey, do mind just letting us know, like, why you didn't add to cart or why you're not interested in that product? And you want to try and get more information. You might give them an incentive to answer these questions, but your data leads you there. Your data informs that something's happened. So now what can we do? What's our next step? And that's...
that's start as role. It's not to do the job for you. It's to give you these little snippets of information and guidance and help you take that next step and be more informed in the way that you market, be smarter and be more time efficient. You know, it just it's the best. Awesome. Exactly. Simply the best. You have the playing in the background. should be. Exactly.
You just have that button, you know, say no more. Say no more. I need that. idea. Thank you so much for your time, I feel like this to me, this was really insightful and eye opening. And of course, they can be overwhelmed for people here. But Brooke takes that out because, you know, things can be complex or we can make it simple.
And I would very much say, Brook is in the business of making things incredibly simple and give you some easy to implement directions and pointers as to where you can invest your time and energy for maximum results. And give you that, ultimately, that time back so you can spend it with your family, with your children, with yourself. Do more yoga. Whatever. Have another tea. It doesn't matter what you want to do with your time.
That's ultimately where this path can lead you to. So thank you so much for this, Brooke. And if you can send me your calendar booking, I could put it to the show notes and anything else that you want to share, that'll be amazing. Easy, of course. No, thank you so much for having me on. This has been a great chat.
