 Thank you. Can everybody hear me? I wasn't sure if this is working right. I don't like standing behind the podium, so I'm going to walk around a little bit. Google Analytics, that's the topic. First, talk a little bit about me. It says I work for ABHS in Amy Beale High School. We're a state chartered high school here in Albuquerque. I'm the IT director. I cover just about anything technology. Part of my job is on our web. I do manage our web. So that's where I'm bringing the web stuff in. I've also got a business background, both small business, especially small business. I did work for a large multinational for about three years and hated every minute of it. Huge companies have advantages, but not for radical people like me. What is not going to be covered today? Number one, other products. There are a ton of analytical products out there, some paid, some good, some bad, some free. I'm going to talk about Google today, Google Analytics. Now, I know I've been in the business long enough to remember when the evil empire was Microsoft. Google is becoming the evil empire. They are taking control of everything, but at least it's not costing us anything like with Microsoft. I am a Google fan, so I do use a lot of Google products. In fact, this is a Google slideshow. I am not an expert. I am a beginner Google analytics person. You could be an expert, and there are all kinds of training, which we'll talk about later. I took a three-day class, and I've done some work myself. That's where I just thought it was such a great topic, especially for small business people, because you, with your own website, it's got to know what's going on, and that's what Google Analytics will do. I consider our school a small business. We have 300 students and 50 employees. We use the web for recruiting students and sharing information. As I said, I don't know everything. So when we get to the questions, if you say, what about this? I might say, huh? Or I don't know. I will not try to make up an answer. There are tons of resources, and we'll cover some of them when you might get that answer. So those are some of the things. The last point is Google loves change. Every other day, it seems like something's changing, and when I'm setting up this presentation, there's a little thing, the bar on the screen saying, change to UI is coming soon. So if you go home in a couple of days, there may be a new UI for your Google Analytics. Google loves change, and it'll probably change three or four more times. So those are the basis. So if anybody can't live with them, if you're looking for expert advice, grab a piece of pizza and head out in the hall for a while. Why analytics? Basic information. That's what I started. How many people visit your website? How many people visit different pages on your website? How long do they stay on your website? Basic things like this. Do I need a better server? Because I've got 10,000 people visiting my site. Or do I have like our school 400 and a small server works fine? Those are the kind of basic information that Google Analytics answers. Track ad campaigns. Now if you use Google AdWords, you can combine AdWords with Google Analytics. I do it by putting the ad to a certain landing page and then I can track that landing page. But you can track how well your advertising campaign's working. Any kind of advertising, not just Google AdWords. Sales funnel. How do you get this big group of people who are prospects down to people actual buying? There are tools in Google Analytics if you're in sales. I'm not really in sales, so I don't really follow that. Our goal is just to get someone to the website to sign an application. Used to be what I was in business was what is called A-B testing. I did a lot of it in the direct mail campaign, you know that junk mail stuff. You could check, rent a restaurant. You could figure out is 50% off, buy one, get one free, a better deal, or better response by customers by counting the different coupons. You can use Google Analytics to do that by wording on a page and have them randomly projected, so you can use that to test what is the best way for your website to look. What pictures, what colors, you can do all that stuff. My last one, by far, is the biggest. You can't fix what you don't measure. How do you know the webpage is doing good or bad if you don't measure something? You come to me and say, hey, my webpage is doing bad, how do you know? Well, I don't got a lot of customers. Well, is it your webpage, what is it? And until you measure that, check over time, you will never be able to tell what is wrong. To me, by far, that's the reason I like Google Analytics. Telling me what's right and what's possibly wrong. Now, what I'll do is I'm gonna pause now just for a second, ask if there's any questions before we move on to the next one. I don't want to just stand up here and be the fount of knowledge. The ivory tower knows all. Does that have any questions up to this point? Okay, you're too tired after lunch, nobody has questions. That's good. The worst presentations I've done is the last one of the last day. What are snowstorms coming? I did that once, I had one person show up. There was a snowstorm on the way in Albuquerque here, and I was the last one at 4.30, and by then, one guy stopped by. And he was already using word press, he just wanted to stop by and talk. Okay, steps to getting Google Analytics. You will need account, you need a Google account. I'm assuming you have Google accounts. Now, I didn't check this, I should have before, because it came up to me as I was sitting there. I'm not sure if the free Gmail account works. I think it does. I have a business account, and I have a school Google accounts. So I know it works with those. I'm assuming it works with Gmail. Good, it does? Yes, good, because you need a Google account. Like I said, they're trying to control the world. Then you need to sign up for an analytics account. Here, there is one, if you do have a business account, it must be turned on. In the admin panel, it can be turned off that Google Analytics is turned off. If you're the admin, it could be that you didn't even realize it, and you have to go in and turn it on. I had to when I was using a couple of fake accounts I used for this presentation. I had to turn it on. I had to turn it on for the administrator, which was me, but then when I sent another account, I had to turn it on. It's not a big deal if you're a Google admin, it's really simple. But you'll need both accounts. I'll show you how to do that in a minute. You have to configure what Google calls a web property, a website. There is a checkbox for mobile apps, but I don't do mobile apps, so I have no idea how that works. It must work fine, because it's Google. You will set up a web property. Now, the good thing is if you are a developer or a consultant, you can set up multiple properties. You don't have to be on your domain. So I have my personal domain, which has a website that my friends and family see, which is like three, and then I've got my school account, but they're both under my personal name. So you can have multiple accounts. I believe it's up to 50. So you will set up a web property. When you set up a web property, you'll get a special tracking code. Now, if you're a masochist, you can manually add that to the header or body of every page. Don't do that if you got WordPress. WordPress does that for us. Now, when I first started it didn't, you had to manually add it to the header. So we're not gonna worry about that. We're just gonna set it up. We're gonna go to WordPress. We're gonna get a plugin, and I'll show you this, and there are several. I will tell you how I select one, and then I'll use one. I'll install it in case you've never installed a plugin if you're brand new. Then we will activate it. That plugin is how we configure it. Very simple. It's gotten so much simpler because all it does is says, activate, click here, put it in, it's asked for your Google account, you go, Google gives you a code, copy and paste it into the plugin, save, you've done it. We'll show you that. And then I verify that it's working. Because you can track real-time statistics, I make sure that I'm connected. There'll be at least one person viewing the website because I view it. That's it, you're done. You have set up Google Analytics for your webpage. So then later I'll talk about what you can do with that, but we're gonna start now, and we're gonna set this up. So, now I gotta get out of my presentation. Do, do, do, that one is it, yep. Okay, Google, Incognito tab or Windows are more than just going to porn sites, not getting caught. You can run two Google accounts at the same time, which is why I use it, truthfully. Okay, we're just gonna go, and we're here, we're signed in, we're gonna type in, we're gonna open a new tab. I have no, I sort of know what the address is, but I'm just gonna type in Google Analytics. And there it is. Okay, nope, that wasn't it. Bummer. Oh, that was the other thing I saved. Google Analytics. Okay, there we are. And now it's gonna tell me I gotta sign in with my, so we're gonna sign up right there. We're gonna do a website. I'm gonna give this, this is not the website name, it's the name that you're gonna look for. So it's gonna be Mark's Travels. Address, where is that? I missed it. Right there, it's gonna be another strange one. And then I'm gonna go down here and give a tracking code. And if everything works right, did I click on it? And this is the problem with live demos. I clicked on it. Did I forget something up on top? Well, that's how you do it, trust me. What is it? Oh, yes. I forgot that, see? Travel. And you also have to pick the type of website you're doing. And it's a travel website. Now I can go. Yay! Of course I accept otherwise I couldn't do this. Okay, I have now set up this Google Analytics account. This is one, and here's this tracking code I was talking about. You don't have to worry about it. Now I just use this account to set one up to show you how we do it. I already have an account set up and that's what we're gonna use. Any question about this part? Right, yes. Switch the owner. You don't need to be. Right, the way it works is you just have to be of access to the website. You don't switch the owner if I'm understanding the question right. Well, you can let somebody else read. Yes, you can, yeah. Long time ago, right. Yes. Do it back. Like if I, you know, got abducted by hateful hands and a little bit of catalytic. It would exist. No, so what you should do is have them set up because more than one person can have an account, use that tracking code. Right. So what if you move to a different school? Yes, I would just delete it because I can delete it because that's how I've been doing it for my own practice. You can delete it. Right. So they don't have, yes, historical. Good question. I don't know everything. Remember that? You know, I should check. Well, I think because I don't think it would save historical. I think once you are linking the accounts, if you delete it, that link's broken. This person will not be able to see anything. And it can't be moved to somebody else? It does have a move, but I don't know if you can move it to somebody else. You can move it to another property in your, if you have in your own dashboard. But I don't know how you can move it to somebody else. Very good question. That's something that I've never done. So, boy, already I'm stumped. Any other questions I can't answer? Okay. We're back to the, so, where is website? I guess I didn't open it. This is my website. Yes, I was in Italy last summer, last fall. I'm signing in and we're gonna install the plugin. Okay, plugins, add new. Up here in the keywords, it's Google Analytics. Now, I'll tell you how I select a plugin. There's probably a million ways. I look at ones that have a lot of users, or users, or whatever they're called. So, yeah, active installs. Okay, these top two have a million. We've got some here with a couple of thousands, tens of thousands, yeah. So, to me, I'm gonna pick a plugin that has a lot of users. So, it's gonna limit it to these two up top. I look next at number of stars. Monster has four stars. Dashboard there has four and a half. Close enough. So, what I would do, and this is what I did is, I tried both. I tried Monster first because that's, Yoast used to have a great analytics plugin. He sold it to Monster, so I was gonna try Monster. Personally, I didn't like it. I don't remember why I didn't like it, but it didn't do some things that I wanted, or it was too hard. For some reason, I didn't like it. I deleted it and I used analytics white dashboard. Your mileage may vary. You may love it. I would pick one of the top two, especially if you're new. Yes. It will delete the, yes. And then we put in a new one in the repopulation code. But it's the same tracking code, because remember that's a Google tracking code, so, no, no. Because this is just to read it. Once you got that tracking code in, it's going to Google. The dashboards then take and use Google's API to put the data into two WordPress, because I'll talk about the two choices of using the WordPress dashboard or the Google Analytics dashboard. But yeah, you can delete them, there's no problem with that. So, let's see, we're gonna install it. Da, da, da, da, da, da. Is that 342 next to the stars in the 508? That's a number of reviews. Number of reviews of that program. Okay, so, if I always read the fives and the ones, not all of them, but I always look at the ones, because maybe the one, the person who did give it a one, had the same problem that I'm looking to solve, because I've seen that before. It doesn't do what you think. I was looking for some Google map API plugins, and I found out the one that I was gonna pick had some once-down reviews, because nowhere did it say you only get one map before they start charging you. You know, it was a free plugin for one use, that's one map. So, I always look at the lower reviews, plus, I have gotten upset with the binary nature of reviews lately. It's either five or one, there's no more middle ground. Whole another subject, okay, it's installed. We activate it, we go here, yay. Then we're gonna go down here to analytics, general settings. It will put up in your sidebar there, and we're gonna authorize the plugin. And it says, get the access code. There was a tutorial you could watch, and it will let you learn that. It's saying, can this account view your data? Yes. It gives you this big, long, hairy number. Copy, close that down. Put that code in there, paste, save. Now you have connected your WordPress to your Google Analytics account. In the olden days, it was a lot harder than that, but then nowadays, that's the basics. There are three or four pages of settings, I don't know, I haven't even looked at them. This does what I need. Basic, simple analytics. And it gives you some information. Now, because I have multiple properties, I have to pick the property. I'm gonna pick that one for right now, which is the one that shouldn't have anybody looking at it. What I do to check, I go to my dashboard. There's my analytics dashboard. And I go to real time. Now I go to the, there, one. I'm on it, so I know it's connected because this is that website. So I have verified, I have connected. In real time data, I know that this has been connected to my website and I can start gathering the analytics data. So that's it to get it. Any questions about setting it up or getting the data? Next we'll talk about what to do with it. Yes, yes, right. So I'll show you how to set up the filter for that. There are filters to do that because I use, Google has a program like everything that does signage, digital signage. So one of the things I didn't realize, my digital sign every 10 minutes updates, that's counted as another visit to my site. So when we look at the data for my school, you'll see a thousand hits to the lobby sign which is a hidden page that only my digital sign is going to. Any other questions about this part so far? Okay, what I'm gonna do is gonna go back now and go to my real site, the one that's got some data to look at. I guess I'm supposed to go to my slides it says. Now what? Now what I'm gonna show you the WPPAT, the WordPress dashboard, I'm gonna show you the analytics dashboard then we'll talk about how to learn more about this, okay? So there, that's what my slide says. All right, so dashboard. This website, real time, there are two people on this website, not me because I'm on the other website. So I can also look at the last 14 days. Come on, here we go. Sessions, that's how many people have been to the website over the last 14 days. You can see we're not a high traffic website. We've got a 1300 sessions, 815 users, bounce rate, which is one of the important things to look at. That's, bounce is, when somebody comes to your website, realizes this is not for them and leaves right away. That's not something you want. You want a low bounce rate because that means if you're getting hits, those aren't the people you want or something's wrong with your page. I think those can be up in the 80s on some pages. Us, 50%, I haven't been around long enough, try to check, see how that works. What else can we find out about here? Search, refers. Refers are who or what site that your visitors come from. And you can see 675 out of 1300 were direct. Direct means they typed in the address on their computer. So that means they know your address. Organic is searches. They went to Bing, Google, I don't know if there's any other ones out there anymore, and typed in something that got to your website. Referral is a link from another website to your website. And social is a link from social media. Click on 26 and it will show you all the referrals. I don't know if you can on this dashboard. Let's check. Nope. You can in the Google Analytics dashboard. It tells you some of the, no, what are those? I can't read my own writing here. Oh, those are some of the, yeah, the refers. So I did click on it and it went to refers. So you can see that Facebook, Wikipedia, that's an interesting one. I believe those are foreign language Facebooks. We use WordFence for security and it lists all the people in all the countries so we get a lot of hack from Russia and Ukraine, a hack attempt so that could be where those are coming from. Maybe somebody posted our, hey, easy site. I don't know, that was a year ago. We were hacked a year ago and I did have to go through the process of redoing it because our backups, we didn't know it was hacked, our internet server host told us it was hacked about five weeks after it was hacked and we only keep 30 days worth of backups. So our backups are corrupted. So it was a fun thing, it was offline for three days but I now have WordFence, it tells me all these things. Okay, refers, other one is your audience. I don't know what that one's called in this one. Locations, here you can tell where it's coming from. India, whoa, we got 17 people coming from India, South Korea, you can change the time. Now, if we look at for the last year and we go back to sessions, you'll see there's a big zero here. There were no, that's because I turned off by accident. Maybe that's what I didn't like about Monster. I think it turned it off by accident on me or I think it was something with the code, it was, I got my, because I have so many two now, I deleted all the extra accounts and it got turned off but you'll see there are blank spots. That's just the way, especially when you first turn it on. So you can go back, I like 30 days is what I like to keep track of and you'll see that's where it just started up. This is probably the one that I use for a quick look every couple of days just to see where this traffic level is at. I will also look at the pages because we have a couple of things right now that are ongoing. So let's go to pages and let's see if we can page views. Nope, that just tells me. One of these and again, they have so many different ones, pages. All right. This tells me what pages and how often they've been hit. So the first one is our homepage, yeah. Staff contact, for some reason, we always have a lot of people looking at our contact list. They're probably scraping it for emails. We made a decision, a management decision to post emails with the understanding there's a possibility of getting spammed but we wanna make sure we provide good contact for parents and students. We felt that I'll waive the negatives. That is a decision we made, that's a decision all website owners need to make. Job opportunities, that's good because we've posted a couple of jobs. I'm glad to see and that's why we look at that there have been people checking our job opportunity page out. Parents page, we have things for parents there. Staff, there's some of the documents like when you wanna take a day off, you have to fill out documents on the staff page. Calendar, school nutrition, stuff. This lobby sign, that's the one that I was telling you about that I had to filter out. It still has a few because in the last whatever days it was still on there. But that is my digital sign I use. The one I'm looking for isn't there is we are in the middle of our lottery season. With a charter school, we accept lottery applications, have a drawing for next year's class. I wanna see how many people are clicking on our lottery application. Not a lot, that's not good for us. The other thing is I just posted an RFP and I don't see any referring to the RFP site. That's not good for me. These are the kind of information I can glean just by looking at some of these basic data. So one word of warning, good security measures are don't use your administrative account for anything other than administration. When I post, I use a different account. It is an editor account. Editor accounts can't see this dashboard. So if you are signed in as an editor and you don't see the dashboard, that's why. You must be an administrator. And I don't like signing in as administration because that is a security hole more or less. Same with my email, I have a separate administrative account. So if you don't see it, that could be the reason why. But if you've installed it, you should see this dashboard. Questions about what the WP dashboard does here. Now this is because of the plugin we've installed. This is not a Google thing. This is a WP dashboard, whatever is called that we installed the plugin. You don't need to look here. That's relatively new. In the past, you always had to go to Google Analytics. I feel Google Analytics has a few more tools if you really want to do a deep dive. I'm finding a lot of them maybe on here, but maybe it's because I've been using Google Analytics. So, same website. Now we're on the Google Analytics page. If we go to, forget where, oh here's the stuff. Here we got all kinds of information. What's this? Traffic over the last seven days, looking at the different arches, referrals organic, direct. You can look at it there. This is a dashboard. You can customize this to have whatever report that interests you on this dashboard. And that's under customization, which I think is that dot, or squares, four squares over here. Yeah, customization. There you can set up your own dashboard. Real-time data audience. Here you can really dive down to cohort. One of these was, you can tell they will take, and because Google knows all about you, they will look at the people on your website. They can tell you gender. They can tell you social, economic, grouping. They can tell all kinds of stuff. It's scary in some ways. What's that? Yeah. But where was that? Is it under? Yeah. See this one? Yeah. Is it under this one? Demographic. There you go. I need glasses. Yeah, I've been tempted to, I can't stand bifocal, so I'm really gonna have to start carrying reading glasses. For that website. Yeah, my demographics is here old. That's no joke. I am really becoming concerned about accessibility of our website, and there is a talk tomorrow I saw about that. Because we're a school, by law we're supposed to be accessible, and we are not. So I'm looking at that. My biggest peeve about this is great text on white background. You designers who've done that give you the ranges of people who visit our website. Our target market is really not, we're probably these two, because we're looking at the parents. We're using other social media to target students. Snapchat is the one that we're looking at as our targeting. We just bought some ads on Facebook. I'm not sure. I bought it for Snapchat, but I got outvoted. So we're using other means to reach prospective students. Those are the age ranges we're looking for. Isn't that crazy? He knows that by your, by when you go searching around the web, by what you look for and sites you visit, it tags you as this demographics. No, it can't do that then. So yeah, there is no privacy left in the world. Google is gonna have it all in another year or two. I'm not worried about the government snooping. It's Google. They have more information. They got more money. They got more computers to snoop than any government in the world. So you can look at things somewhere on here, things like what's the operating system? What is, what's mobile versus desktop? Which is important, usually more important, now anybody not designing that's mobile friendly is making a big mistake. So that's not as important. There is some browser incompatibilities. Some people still use IE, believe it or not. You could see what percentage use that browser. You can see what screen resolution they're using. There is an amazing amount of information to get lost in. It's like the old Solitaire game on computers which you could play for hours and not get anything accomplished. You're gonna do the same with this. Wow, how many English speakers do I have? We do wanna make sure we are not bilingual. That's one of our goals. Any official form we do make bilingual on there, but it'll be interesting to see how many Spanish speakers come to our website. Because we are a majority bilingual school. We're 46% Hispanic. And so we are concerned about that. So I make a joke about it. But yeah, you can find all kinds of stuff. Now, let's see, I've got a few minutes yet. The cool thing, down here under administration, which is that little thing, here's where you could set up more properties and things, but filters, here's where you can say, hey, don't bring anybody, block, exclude anybody from maybe H.S., our high school. So what I did, I've got our IP address on the out-facing IP address, and I said, okay, here's our IP address. Exclude traffic from this, that equals this IP address. Moving forward, it will exclude that traffic. It didn't do it historically, which I thought it would. That's why I still have a few of those lobby signs on there. So you could set up different filters based on different things. IP address is by far the easiest. You can do it by domain. There used to be one for logged in users. That's the one I used to use a lot, and I'm not even sure if it's still there, but I don't see it, but there might still be somewhere to do it. This is the basic filters. This is important, especially the filter from a big business like ours, which we have. We have 300, 400 users, and I set our home page as our default browser. So therefore, every time somebody goes there, it would have hit, and because color is the session. We didn't want that, so we put a filter in. So that's filters. From that page? The whole site. It does not include anybody from an internal computer that goes to our website. It does not count it. Now, it's a little confusing, is we have our students all have their own laptop. They take that laptop on the school and connect to their home network, then it's counted, because we don't know their home network. It's done by IP address, and while I understand IP addresses and DNS, I don't expect anybody to. That's above the need to run a website, or even do most developing. So yeah, there's a little flaws in that, but it works. On the whole, it does what we want. If you wanted to exclude that, we could have the biggest global page in such a particular way. And we're also looking at requiring, because with Chromebooks, we could require a proxy, and that means they would have to log in through a proxy we have on our network. Yeah, we're doing that because then, right now, technically, not technically, actually, when they are at school, content is filtered in schools. By law, we must filter for inappropriate content, which is not defined, and I have an argument about that one. But when they leave the school, they're not going through the filter. So by making them go through a proxy, we will make them go through the filter. That's gonna happen in July, August timeframe, when we do an update. But yeah, all these laws, it's somebody who's asking about HIPAA. There's a whole alphabet soup of rules we have to follow, FERPA, CEPA, just all these great protection acts. Okay, this is an overview of what you can see. You can also do reports, print them out, send them, send those PDFs. You can add collaborators or whatever they're calling them in Google terms nowadays that share the reports with. Nobody in my school even cares to look at this. I will usually just talk about, I will talk about the pages and whether we're getting hits to our AdWords campaign or to the website that we're talking about. Other than that, nobody in our school needs it. And I'm betting, if you're in a small business, probably nobody else is gonna need to see this, unless you have a partner. Then maybe the two partners need to. But it's available. Questions about this, we've got one more topic is what to do next or how to move forward. But looking for any questions right now? There's a question back there, two of you. Can you what? Can you use this for any website? Any website, just gotta get the tracking code in the header. Yeah, because this will work for non-WordPass websites without a problem. Question? No. Yes. The WordPress, I look at every couple of days and to get the big picture. If I'm having a meeting with my boss, I meet with him every other week and right now we're in the season where we're looking at those people applying. I will look at how many people have clicked on our Ad campaign. And I will look at how many are social media and I will give him that and distill it into a couple sentences of this is what's happening. So then I use it from the Google Analytics. This might be on the WordPress, I don't know, I know Google Analytics, I don't know all the details of that. So, good questions. Other ones, raise your hands up high, I'm half blind, we've decided that. Okay, what's next? I did a search on Google for Google Analytics training, 5.1 million hits. You can find training on Google Analytics free, paid all over the web. I also just recently found out, Google offers a certificate in Google Analytics. However, you have to be a Google partner which means you have to have a certain volume of business to qualify for that. If you're an agency or a freelancer, you may qualify for that, so that may be something you'd want to look into as a Google certification in Analytics. If you're like me, I learn better in person. So, apologies to our hosts, I don't know if they have a class, but University of New Mexico Continue Ed does. This is the class I took, it's coming up in February. Web Analytics with Google, it's a couple of nights for a few hours. Very, very basic, it takes what I've told you and maybe gives you a little bit more. However, that's what I took. I really recommend this, this prerequisite. If you've got a WordPress site, you don't need to worry about the prerequisite. Show up, there's a couple other classes on this page that are interesting. One is on writing for the web, which I need to learn. The last time I took writing classes was technical writing, which is completely different than copywriting. So, I do recommend this. I also look at a lot of these trainings. However, remember, Google changes a lot. Don't look at a course from a year ago or two years ago. Who knows if it's still gonna be accurate? This is just a UNM, yes. I was in your class, so she taught it, I thought it was good. She's also teaching the one on writing. I'm trying to get that approved this year too. So yeah, great class. The other thing I was gonna show you, this is just a little tip that most people don't know about Google. Let's say I wanna do Google Analytics tutorials, right? Okay, I have no idea when these came on. Did you know you can filter for dates? Where is it on my little page? I should have looked settings, tools. All of these results are only a year old. I love that when I'm looking for information help. Okay, I've got a problem with Windows, and it's not doing this. I don't care if it didn't do it in Windows 95. That's useless to me, so I search. I always sort down, filter down. That is not part of my talk. That is free and no cost. So we have any questions more about Google Analytics or if you are done and I'll shut up and somebody else can talk. Anybody else, no? No? Going once, going twice. I'm about to shut my microphone off. All right, well thank you very much.