This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
In today's question and answer episode, we're gonna hear from a consultant who wonders how customers are finding them. Really interesting here. You could just ask them, I suppose, but let's assume you've got a lot of customers. Let's assume you've got a website. You've got people coming to the website.
Not everybody actually checks out and makes a purchase. Where do all these people come from? How do you figure out which ones are making a purchase? How do they go about navigating their journey? How are they persuaded and so on?
Or not persuaded if they don't make a purchase? Now, if you don't know the answer to this question, if you're selling something, you might be doing the wrong things. But of course, how do you actually find out? So this is pretty important because you could be making decisions based on incorrect information. You could be spending a lot of time on Instagram, just for example, even though not a single client has ever found you that way.
You could be devoting hours to writing a blog that no one reads. And it's not just time, as important as time is. That's extremely important, but also you could be spending money on ads that aren't converting. But if you have customers coming in from another source, you might misattribute them to the ads. You might think, oh, these customers are coming because I'm spending money on ads.
So then you're just gonna keep wasting money. So as you can see, this matters a lot. Let's see if we can help out our caller, a consultant who wonders how customers are finding them. Detailed question and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Craig, and I'm a longtime listener.
Google Analytics don't show nearly as much info as it used to. Most search terms are blocked in the reports, so I really don't know where people are coming from. I want to invest in some ads for my consulting services, but since I know most money spent on advertising is wasted, I want to make sure I spend it in the right place. How can I figure out which website visitors are most profitable? Thanks, and I'm looking forward to your response.
[Music]
All right, all right, thank you for the call. Thanks for being out there. And this is important for so many of our listeners. And what we're dealing with here, it's fundamentally a matter of attribution. Like that is the technical term, just like you hear SEO, search engine optimization.
In the world of e-commerce, you might hear the word attribution. Where are customers coming from? And the answer to that question is critical, especially if you have multiple sales channels, especially if you're marketing in different ways. And as I said, you might be spending money somewhere, so you need to actually think about attribution. And first things first, you'll never have perfect attribution, right?
So let go of that, you know, that's okay. In the podcasting world, for example, we do lots of brand advertising. You know, like when I read the ads for the show, sometimes I'm not actually directing people to a link. It's just kind of awareness for that brand. So they don't know exactly, you know, for each particular show where all the customers are coming from.
You just want to get as much correct info as possible. And generally you do that by two methods, analytics and surveying. So the surveying can be really simple. You know, if you are selling an e-commerce product, you simply have a question box, you know, after checkout that asks, where did you find us? Like, I'm sure you have seen that from buying things online.
If you have clients that you do a service for, well, you can ask when you talk with them. And here's the funny thing about that, by the way, a lot of people won't know. Like when you ask them, how'd you hear about me? They won't remember. Like they do a lot of things online.
So sometimes it's hard to trace the source. Again, you won't have perfect attribution. You just want good enough attribution. And the second method is analytics. So you definitely want to have Google analytics or, you know, some other tool or resource installed.
So you can go in and look and see, okay, where are people actually checking out from? Where do they come from? What's the journey? You know, what customer journey in terms of they went to this page, they went to that page. You can set up goals.
You can get very, very detailed with it if you want, or you can just look for some general information. Where are they coming from? Right, 'cause that is the single most important question you have at this point, where are they coming from? And how can I do more to attract more of those people? And maybe let go of that blog or that Instagram or whatever it is that's not working.
So once you have something that is selling at all, spend some time on attribution. It's definitely going to be worth your efforts. Good luck there. And listeners, if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions, let me know what you're working on. We'll continue to feature them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners.
I'm so glad you're out there. I'm cheering you on. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
