 So, today's guest is Allison Knott, who's going to talk a little bit about Google Analytics. It's big, it's scary, there's a lot in there, but luckily, Allison is going to sort of cut through that and only talk about the 25% that you actually need to pay attention to as a small to medium-sized nonprofit. So who's Allison? Allison is a return presenter. We loved her so much the first time, we brought her back. Allison is an international tech speaker who's passionate about the intersection of the web, creativity, and business. She's a proud woman in tech and produced Atlantic Canada's first WordPress conference and meetup. She also mentors emerging female designers and entertains business owners with nerdy facts. Her main mandate to raise the web literacy for nonprofits and small businesses. As you'll see in her presentation, she has an unusual blend of high-octane enthusiasm and actionable lessons. Or in tech jargon, no thank you, that's not here today. And so, with that, let me get out of the way and pass you over to Allison. Welcome to the den of Google Analytics. My darlings, my darlings, thank you so much for today. Now we're in the matrix of me, inside of you, inside of you, inside of you, inside of you, inside of you, inside of you. Okay, there we go. Just to confirm, is it now mostly my screen because I cannot see your wonderful system anymore? Full screen. That all works well. Ben and I are going to go off-camera now. Awesome. Fantastic. So darlings, this is going to be a fun dive into just 25% of that Google Analytics pie that you need to know. During this particular talk, there aren't any key stopping points I believe in being interrupted because I'm just one little lady in a box talking to a bunch of other boxes across our beautiful planet. So at any point in time, drop anything you need into the chat and Eli will let me know and he will interrupt on behalf of you to make sure I don't leave you dangling in the wind with this whole idea about Google Analytics. So I'm just going to dive right into it because I've got lots to cover today. So what I will be covering is the basics. Yes, it's a big, large system. What we have to remember about Google Analytics is that it was designed to help all sorts of websites. It had to be as generic and as malleable as possible because it'd be possible that a small blog would use it or maybe a very large e-commerce website and everybody in between. So I definitely respect that when you look at it, it can be very overbearing and very cumbersome to look at. But in the daily work that I do with my non-profit clients, we don't look at all the reports. We only focus on the parts that matter towards end goals, your ideal audience and your ROI. So today we're going to talk a little bit about what you need to know about your audience, what the heck are they doing, and how do they get to your website. We're going to be about articulating some of your goals and of course lots of tips and tricks along the way. And along the bottom here, and it'll probably pop up in the chat shortly, there is links to these slides and later there will be a recap of this video. So just before I get deep, deep, deep into all this gold, I do want to let you know that I am going to be talking about Google Universal Analytics, not the newer GA4. And the reason for that is that at this point in time, they are still working out the bugs with GA4. And with Universal, there is no timeline yet in place in which Google is going to retire it. Some people murmur it's going to be in four years, others say they have no idea. In case you're interested, you can actually run GA4 and Universal at the same time and I recommend you actually do that. If you haven't installed Google Analytics on your website yet and you plan to, when you set it up, it's going to prompt you to do the GA4, but there is an option to also turn on Universal. So in thinking about that, I do want to let you know that no matter what you've heard, having Google Analytics installed does not affect your page rank or your SEO. You are not going to have a leg up because you've got this installed simply for having it installed and tracking your traffic. However, it will inform you a little bit on the behavior of your website, which in turn can make you have better decisions about changing your website for those and then change results. But just in case you're wondering, if you don't have it installed or you do, does it now automatically give you extra SEO points? It's not how she works. And also, whenever you put in new filters or features or turn on certain aspects of Google Analytics, it will not apply that retroactively to your data. It only does it moving forward. So the sooner you put these tips and tricks in place, the sooner you're going to have a more wealth of information happening because it can't really go back in time and fix all of those changes that you've made. And of course, the system is not perfect. People in Incalbedo browsers, if they have ad blockers, if they're using multiple devices, they aren't necessarily counted towards this. But ultimately, there isn't a single data visualization or tracking system I'm aware of that's 100% accurate, right? It's not perfect, and we are the guinea pigs. And algorithms and math equations are used. So by, I would never say to any nonprofit that you should live or die by the data that Google Analytics gives you. It's a little too particular, and humans are far too interesting, and could move around interesting ways for you to deal with that. But it is a great place to find a foundation of what your traffic is doing, and ideally, then, what your ideal traffic is doing. You might be saying to yourself, I mean, this is great, Allison, but we don't have a lot of traffic right now. Or we don't have Google Analytics installed yet. The cool thing is, is that you can actually sign in and get access to the Google Merch Store, and that's how they demo Google Analytics for you. So you can click that support link there, and very quickly in two steps, you can be granted access to their account, in which you're able to see all the great features that GA offers. So if you want to see a really bumping website that's going live, and people are buying stuff and moving around and coming from YouTube and everything else, then do install that demo data to get a really sense of idea of how powerful this system is. Getting started. We're in the heck can we start with all of this? What 25% am I going to pull out of the sky and get to you? Well, the first thing is you're going to want to filter yourself out because Google Analytics doesn't really know when you're on your site or not out of the box. And what I mean by this is it's quite possible that you and your team are fiddling around on the website pretty often and you don't necessarily want to capture that data. And it's not actually connected to your physical machine. It's based on the router from which you're accessing the internet from. So you want to make sure that you want to enter in and filter out your IP address from the office, library, coffee shop, if you're able to, depending on where you are and what your COVID restrictions are. And you do that under the admin and then add a filter. And of course, in the slides, there's a link to do that. And then you would put in your IP address. For most of us, it's just a matter of going to Google and typing in what is my IP address and adding it. But you might need to talk to your tech team in case you have some internet going on or some wider, more complex IP configuration in the building or system that you work in. And oh, my darlings, I wish I could say that there's some way to avoid spam and junk mail in this life. You get it in your email, you get it in your actual physical mailbox and you're going to get Google Analytics spam and Google Analytics. I know we can't escape it, right? But the sooner that you make sure that you have bot filtering turned on and admin views and view settings, the easier it is for as we all go through and work with Google Analytics together, they build like a black I know a list, right? That's going to keep people and known bots and spiders out of there. They are still going to happen from time to time. You might review your data and see a huge spike. And it turns out just from this website called like botscope.xyz. The only reason they do that is they hope that you will click it and go to their websites. It's tough, it's ongoing, but you can now filter out your spam with a bot filtering setting. And the other thing is to link your Google Search Console. So there are two different products with Google, right? So there's Google Analytics, which is sort of like a fishing rod in the river that is your website. And it's just kind of monitoring activity as it happens. On the other side, we have something called Google Search Console. And that is monitoring any traffic or potential traffic you get when people are searching on the Google Search Engine. So they're separate products, but you do want to link them together. The number one reason is in recent years, Google Analytics isn't the greatest way to figure out things of like the actual keywords and queries people are searching for. And the other part is that Google Search Console will give you important data, even if people don't click from your, from the Google Search results into your site. It can do things like what kind of queries were used, how many times you appeared in search results, and that click through rate of when they appear. So Google Search Console is helpful, even if they don't go to your website, and then Google Analytics is all about what happens while people are mowing around on your delightful content. And if you have a site search on your website, you know, like a little search box that people can go into and find things for those power users that you have, you can turn that on so that Google Analytics will also let you know all of the queries that people search when you're on your website. So if you were with WordPress, it's very complicated. You turn on site search and you type the letter S, because that's how Google or sorry, that's how WordPress understands that there was a search query happening. And for Squarespace, it will begin to gather that data once you add Google Search Console. So that's a lot of fun. And so when you have that set up, it's not going to be a lot of traffic or a lot of results, generally speaking, but depending on your site design, if you have a lot of articles or you have a very convoluted navigation system, you might find out that you have users who are using your search bar as a way of navigating and finding items. Maybe they're misspelling or using alternative spellings. That's something that's really important to you. Or they're trying to hunt for a white paper or a cause that or a story or some other piece of content that you haven't been promoting lately, but it's being searched. So looking into behavior, site search and then search terms can be very valuable asset, right? As far as are we putting things correctly on our website? What are people interested in? It's a good nugget to know. And out of the box, Google Analytics doesn't have demographics turned on. And the reason is that you sort of a third party script to do this, it changes the parameters of your privacy policy a little bit. So if age, gender and interests are interest to you from a traffic perspective, you will want to turn this on. Now, the thing is that this is quite subjective because number one, gender expression cannot be limited to just two ideas anyway. So that's a little bit of a strange way of trying to capture information for our traffic, but it's also subjective to the user's history and their other interactions with Google. Again, it's not perfect, but it could be useful information for you, right? Perhaps you want to need to know that age demographic or the one that's really interesting is Affinities and in market segments. In particular, that right hand screen there can be very useful if you want to or do run Google ads. These same categories are used when you're placing Google ads so you can actually use this from a traffic perspective to help inform what buckets and areas of focus you want to place those ads into. I know my intro. I'm so sorry, Eli and folks that said that I wasn't going to get into jargon, but there is a little bit of basic jargon. I'm just going to try to make it as fun and exciting as possible considering. For the dashboard, so I'm going to get my little melty, melty rolling around here. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to go over all of these sort of reporting sections, not all of them, only the 25%, I think you know. And over here on the top right hand side is our time frames, right? That's how you use a calendar picker to figure out what level of time you want to look at your historical data. It can also be comparative. So you could compare this quarter to last quarter, this quarter to last year's quarter or any kind of time frames that you want. And I do recommend with Google Analytics that if you start looking at your data on a daily basis, you're going to drive yourself bananas. I don't really recommend it unless you're doing a very targeted, limited run campaign. Otherwise, you want to think about how the work and flow of your nonprofit is. You might be more important for you to look at it every week or every month, every quarter or whatever sort of section seasonal trend based time that makes sense for you. And then depending on the reports that you activate over here within these reporting sections, you're going to see different sorts of data visualization and also you may see different kinds of behavior, dimensions and metrics. And we will get into that language just a section. So this part stays the same. The upper portion tends to stay the same and in the middle will transform based on what sort of insights you're looking for. So in Google Analytics, what's that like? How are we measuring what's going on here? We measure it in a number of languages. The first one is dimension, which is a really fancy way for the thing you're trying to look at, right? You're trying to look at a city or looking at a page or you're looking at a goal, for example. And then metric is just the results used that articulates that dimension. In other words, a percentage or a number could be positive, could be negative, could have a delta in there, depending on what the math is. And then we talk about users. Now, when we talk about users, we don't physically mean individual people. We're talking about cookies, which is why it's important, your privacy policy to make sure that you are letting the world know that you have Google Analytics installed because it's using cookies to track the activity on that website. So it is entirely possible if a person is on their computer and then they're on their phone, they could become two users, right? Because there's two different cookies being launched on the website while they're on it. And there's also segments. You might have heard that term when you're doing email marketing. The same thing applies in Google Analytics, which is even though you have all the data at a glance of all of your traffic, you can filter it a little bit to just drill down to a certain section. So maybe you only want to look at activity from a particular country or city, or maybe you only want to look at the activity based on your organic growth. And then we've got to think about, well, what are we measuring exactly with Google Analytics? I'm going to tell you one thing we're not measuring, hits. When you say I had lots of hits to my website, it is like 1995, man, like Rocco's Modern Life is on TV, Say by the Bell is doing reruns at this point. We don't really talk about hits on websites. Instead, we like to focus on what we call page views. And that's basically each time a user is on a page and in Google Analytics, a repeat view during a session is counted. So if I was to come on your awesome website and I went to your home page, that I went to your about page and I went back to your home page, that is three page views. Or if I reloaded your website five times, that would be five page views. We don't say hits because hits is whatever a piece of content is loaded. So back in the day, when we would say hits, if you had a website with five pictures on it, it would be six hits. One hit to load the page and then five extra hits just to load those images. So we stick to page views. And there's also unique page views. I don't think I don't often really rely on this metric that over this measurement that I want to use, but it is calculated on a session basis. This is a way for Google Analytics to kind of overcome that idea about people reloading a page view. So it's only calculated. So if they were to reload a page five times, that would be calculated as a unique page view. So when you see those those dimensions listed on a page and behaviors, most of them more than likely your page number will be higher than unique page views because there's probably some back and forth going on of people visiting your website. And we understand this through sessions. So what Google Analytics does is it waits until the user clicks something, scrolls something or moves away from the from the browser tab all together. That's when it starts calculating all its information. So it's calculated a session on the time that it interacts with your website before it leaves all together. And by default, it's set up to end after 30 minutes of an activity. Now that could include if you have a really juicy article and you're just sitting there and reading it and you haven't touched your mouse for 30 minutes and you're still reading it 32 minutes later, the session's going to end. Or if you have to if you have a link and someone clicks it and it opens a new tab, that starts a new session. So we've got to be careful about how we're going to be organizing and notating those timers. And of course, conversion is what I'm really after here. Right. How do you know a page that contributed to people doing the thing you wanted them to do? Right. If they sign up, if they opt in, did they donate? But how do we reverse engineer how they got to that point? In Google Analytics, we do that through goals and e-commerce or also UTM campaign parameters. There's also one that a lot of people like to talk about, and that's the bounce rate. I think maybe because it's just the shortest word in here, people really gravitate towards this term. But a bounce rate is when there's this percentage of single page visits. It's sort of like when you're at a party and you invite a friend and you're like, hi, Sineal, nice to see you. And you go get them a glass of punch and you go back and they're gone. Because they bounced. Ah, a lot of people are really worried that having a high bounce rate is really awful for their website. Generally speaking, you want to bounce rate between 40 and 60 percent. But I do not like to calculate it based on all of your site traffic. And the reason being is I care more about people doing something that's going to move the needle forward for your nonprofit. So if my whole job is to go to your contact page and then connect with the E.D. through a contact form and I do that on that page and I leave. Who cares if it's got a high bounce rate. The job to be done was to sign up and get a hold of you and your team to do deeper meaningful work. Comparatively, if you have a three blog series about a really critical aspect or cause that you're working on right now and all of those pages have a high bounce rate when it should have been that people should have read the first one the second one and third one or the combination. Then yes, a high bounce rate that maybe should go back and evaluate how that page is set up. Speaking about these measurements, how about your audience and their behavior? Right. You know, in my former life of doing graphic design and web design work before became a consultant, I always wanted to know, like, why do they pick the red button over the green? Why did this messaging work and not that messaging? So what is it about your audience, their behavior? That's the real powerhouse of Google Analytics. So here we do have a section called the audience tag and overview. You can see here that it gives us a timeline. We got set up by weeks at the moment. It may have a variety of dimensions for which we can look at new users, sessions, number of sessions per the users and our lucky page view. But I'm going to be honest. I don't. I usually look at this page if we're trying to figure out a starting point for what people are doing with their websites, but it's quite possible you will rarely visit this particular report afterwards. But it can be a great way for you to capture succinctly from a human behavioral standpoint. What's going on with our traffic at the moment? For those of you who are kind of nodding off at all of this and you want to step up to attention, I've got one slide here that if you forget everything I say and if the internet blows up tomorrow and all you have is one slide about the most important report to have in Google Analytics. If you only remember one, where do you go? You go to behavior, site content, all pages. No matter who I work with, this is the report I'm digging around the most often. And what this is doing, it is showing you at a glance in order of most page views what I would call the most visited pages of your website. And on top of that, they are letting you know probably the most key dimensions that we want to look at, right? The unique page views, average time on page, how long on average should people spend reading this piece of information? If it's a blog post that you know should spend five minutes reading and you're only getting 30 seconds, you can have a wealth of page views. But if people aren't sticking around to read it, you might need to reevaluate how you're promoting that content piece or how that page loads or even if you're actually speaking to the right audience when you're trying to promote it. So this one gives you so much ooey, gooey, good stuff. And I love digging deeper and deeper into it. And in a couple slides in the future, I'm going to say how you can even power up this particular report a little bit more. But this one is where I spend most of my time with new, returning and regular clients. But under the audience tab, there is also the location perspective. And I like to remind people that you can actually drill down by city and not just country. It's pretty good at this stage as far as encapsulating counties and other areas within a province or territory. And this could be really great if you're trying to either start a new initiative at a new location. Maybe you ran some ads in another physical location than you're used to, or just to see if there's any kind of uptake in interest of what's happening. Again, it's not going to be exactly what you want because ad blockers and incognito browsers and other things are going to happen. For example, I'm located in Nova Scotia. But for some reason, my IP always fits me out in New Brunswick. Thanks, Belle. That's just the way it's going to be. But this work can be very useful. And I often recommend to nonprofits that if let's say you're in the habit of reporting quarterly, I like to grab the top 10 cities and just monitor that against any campaigns you're running to see if you are getting some traction from those locales. And the other one is behavior, site content, landing pages and landing pages. So while the other one was just your top pages just based on overall traffic by those that had the most page views, this one is specific to landing pages, which means this is the first page they came to. So I'm going to tell you that all the years of building websites and looking at analytics and creating visualizations and working with clients, people are not going to come to your website the way you expect them to. Not everyone is going to start from your home page and work their way through however you lovingly and carefully set up your navigation. Humans come in from your about page. They come in from a blog post and they click the bottom footer then they click the sidebar might go home and about and home at about four or five times they're going to do it all. So in this one, I like to look at this especially if I'm trying to get some insights on SEO activity. And the second I'm going to show you again how we can drill down deeper into that but landing pages is usually a good way of proving about your organic traffic and also any social media traffic that you have. And this could be very surprising for most folk it's going to be your home page but you could have some amazing pages that are actually hitting it out of the park right on the onset you're going to want to figure out why are those pages becoming the first touch with people that might also be an important thing that you might find some landing pages you weren't expecting to be such high heavy hitters that you might want to start placing some asks on right. So maybe on your home page you have a really important event coming up and you've only got that on your home page but you look at this report it knows that there's three other pages that are kicking it just kicking it when it comes to traffic you might want to start putting event information on there too because you've got audiences coming and you don't want them to miss out on critical pieces of content. So they're doing stuff but I got to wonder I'm interested from a consulting perspective and from a growing your brand awareness growing your cause awareness if we're all the hard work we do in our nonprofit lights how are people getting to your website because even though we have all these page news not all pages are created equally right not all people who come to your website are exactly the kind of donors you want or funders you want or volunteers or canvassers or people that you want working on your team or that public that you want to know more about your cause. So under acquisitions that's the term we use in Google Analytics for how did we acquire these people in our basket? So you can click on the overview and get a nice little pizza pie pie chart of all the different ways that people come in and depending on your website and the kind of traffic you have you might have different named sections than what's coming out here. And again, you can quickly see where your different channels are coming from and a little bit of their behavior and then you can drill down a bit more in the sub tabs to find out more about those particular kinds of traffic. But some of what I would like for you to focus on is of course organic search. These are people coming from Google being et cetera. And again, Google Analytics will tell you about their behavior but if you're really interested in what keywords and queries they're using you're going to want to bounce over to Google search console and do that. About seven or eight years ago Google Analytics used to show us that and they don't really do a good job anymore. Go over to search console and look there. Referral are any other websites that have a link and then people clicked it and came to yours. And so for us as a nonprofit sector I'm going to say this is really important for are we connecting with our community partners and making sure that we have links that are relevant in their resources page or a blog post they wrote or a retrospective or like we do here with TechSoup events. We do recaps of the content. I know when I get clicks from all the Harvard that's been done recapping those articles because I'm going to find it in my referral traffic. And it's also a great space for you to understand as well are there any other sites or communications you didn't realize that you're getting traffic from and you might want to reach out to them and build a stronger connection as community partners for content, for doing work together whatever collaboration means to you. But I do want to put a little caveat on referral it's not a perfect bucket. It also come times does things like Facebook will show up in there sometimes or I think some of Facebook's like mobile traffic will show up as well and Linktree especially if you use Linktree for Instagram it's going to show up in referral because of the best of Google Analytics mind that's a website necessarily a social app so you have to be careful with that. And there's one called Direct and Direct is like the black hole of all of these buckets of how people come basically either is going to mean three things they type it directly into their browser and came to your website they bookmarked your website it came to it that way or Google has no idea where to put them they can't put them in the search bucket they can't put them in referral they can't put them in email so it lands there. And the biggest takeaway I would say from that is do your due diligence to track and promote all of your content and traffic so you shrink down how much of your traffic is direct. Sometimes you can tell if that traffic is brand based because they'll go to particular pages and you're like oh only people who really know our brand or know our cause or know our initiatives would visit these pages. So when I see this under the direct bucket we know we're doing our job from a brand awareness perspective but you could have some pages where you're like I have no idea how these folks got here and they're not really sitting into our other buckets. We have some work to do when we're sitting on our campaigns to try and make sure that we can attribute all of our traffic to other buckets than Google's fancy bucket. Of course they're social you got YouTube, Facebook, Instagram but you also got Reddit and Yelp and Quora in Pinterest, right? So a lot of social traffic can go in there and that's a great way for you to drill down. Yes, while it's great that people like to comment and on Facebook with their posts what does that traffic do? Is that traffic more active than our other traffic? It's good to find out. The course page search is if you are running Google ads your content will show up in there or so your traffic will show up in there and email is generally going to be your newsletter platform so like Active Campaign, MailChimp, ConvertKit all of those done right. They should be landing inside of your email bucket of acquisitions but it also does sort of include Outlook and Yahoo and Gmail but it's only if the campaign is set up correctly. So email is okay, it's not the most sound bucket we have it really does depend how the email client system you use to set up if it's fitting it out. In that case I highly recommend using like UTM parameters to kind of tag those pieces. Which is great, okay cool. So we've got a little overview but like I'm not here for that Allison. I'm here to understand what in the heck do I do with this giant open box that is Google Analytics? So let's put it together, right? Like how can we action some of these things? When I talk with clients I think there's a misconception that I will go into their Google Analytics and like a crystal ball I will look into it and all of a sudden based on all these numbers and data I'm gonna see a complete picture what's happening with your website but actually it's not like that at all. In fact, I need to understand who is your audience and is their behavior lining up with the goals or ROI that you have set up for your site? Once we understand that we go to Google Analytics and we ask a question first and then we go digging into the data to find answers not look at the data and hope that some sort of story emerges. Story starts with a why and a question and a motive, and from there you go looking into your data. So when you're looking at it you wanna hold in your mind if I'm thinking about our ideal audience, our ideal funder, our ideal cold lead, warm lead whoever's persona you have in mind and you think and I'm thinking about them in terms of donating or thinking about them in terms of creating a collaboration with other organizations then you go digging around Google Analytics to see if you can solve what's happening with them. You can also use it to look at performance of pages and posts. Based on what makes sense again for your goals and ROI you can look at great performing pages and then contrast those with pages that aren't doing as well and then you can kind of go, oh, I wonder we think we have a hypothesis that this page is doing well because of X, Y and Z. This one isn't. Why don't we test what we've done on this page on that one, let it run for three months and see if we can't increase the behavior we want. And that could come down to things like new functionality or changes you're doing. Maybe you started adding pop-ups to see if people would sign up for your events. Maybe you changed your donation system and you wanna track how that success went. Maybe you're changing some design. Maybe you've added a whole events module and you're just curious to know if anybody actually bothers looking at the events section of your page or if they're gonna continuously just use Eventbrite or Facebook to access those pieces. So when you're starting out, it's more about what's my core audience wanna do? What do I hope they do and did they do the thing we wanted to do? And if not, can we reverse engineer where it might've worked better and test that out? And one thing I dearly offer up as a tip is when I do go looking at clients data, I will see some interesting, like after they've asked, you know, we've asked the questions, I'm going in with my little, my little sleuthy hat in my, in my supply glass, so I'm looking around. I might see trends or I might see some sort of flow or spikes or some really interesting anomalies. And I'll go back and I'll say, oh, can you tell me what happened between of May and September of last year? And I'll get, I think we did an event. Did we publish that series? Is that when we were on CTV? So what you can do in Google Analytics is to avoid wondering what in the heck happens when you're looking at historical data is you can leave notes and they're called annotations in Google Analytics. There's a couple of ways to do them, but the quickest way is whatever you see a timeline illustrated like this, there is a little dropdown arrow. And when you click it, you can fill out a little note to yourself and set the date. And you can be private or collaborative about it. So private would be you want to keep a note for yourself. Maybe you're a developer or maybe you're working internally and you don't want anybody to know that you forgot to publish that blog post for two weeks, you want to leave a note for yourself, you can put it in there. Or collaboratively means anyone who has access to the Google Analytics will be able to leave your notes. As you can see here, the little notes will be these little tiny speech bubbles on whatever date you put in. So what would you leave as a note or an annotation? Whenever you publish new content, hopefully you have a really strong content calendar setup so you actually know when things are sent. But Google Analytics, it's good to always put in when a new page or post or other kind of post type is launched. Any marketing, email campaigns, digital advertising you want to leave notes about. Any offline advertising, right? We're talking about reaching a new city or a new region. You might want to leave a note in Google Analytics that you ran a TD ad or a radio ad or you did a print ad. Any major website changes, new design, new content, you're testing out a new plugin. Any website or server problems, maybe you're hosting went down for a couple of days. Maybe your cart system wasn't working or any other notes. If you think that it might be useful to future you when someone, myself or someone else in your team goes digging through the data, do leave that note. And of course, you don't have to log in to Google Analytics every time I look at a report. In fact, you can schedule them and just have them emailed to you. So when you are looking at a report in the top right-hand corner just above the date picker will be an export feature. And you have an option to email it as a PDF, Google Sheet Excel or a CSV depending on whatever your preferred way of working with data is. And then you can email it to yourself and then you can even set down the frequency like daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and then what day of the week you want it to send and for how long you want to do it. So you can set up a report, get comfortable what report matters to you in the 25% and then just get emailed and that's almost like a great reminder. Oh yes, every end of the month we always go in and we look at our acquisitions tab. I just want every month to check in and see if we're doing that work. We said we're going to be more active on YouTube and promote it through Facebook. I want to go in and see if we're actually doing that month over month. You don't even go into Google Analytics, but our ones you can just have it emailed to yourself and you will just look like tip top boss that you are. Now talk a little bit about driving a bit deeper, right? This is for the folk in the room that definitely are already a little more familiar with Google Analytics. They kind of want a little more juice, a little more right in it. So we've already talked about there's these dimensions that fall down, page view, sources, that kind of thing. But you can add another dimension on top to drill even deeper into your data so that you don't again have to do guesswork. So when you're in a report, there's this little button here called secondary dimension. Just a fancy way for saying, hey, do you want to like slice and dice your content an extra way by adding another viewpoint on it? Sure. And what I like to use is source slash medium. In other words, it talks about where do they come from by what sets? So you can see here that we're on the top pages website view here. And then we clicked a secondary dimension and we set it to source slash medium. So right now we know that in here workshops on this particular website had some traffic, but now it's actually delineated it between direct traffic and also Google traffic. So now you're not just saying, oh, the workshops page is the most visited page of our website, but so much of it is coming from direct and so much of it is coming for Google. So again, you're adding an extra layer and we're gonna have to say source slash medium. I tend to have that turned on often when I'm doing my deep dive inside of reports. So to the light to use, like I said, is source slash medium and landing page. So I wanna know, even though one of these pages has a lot of traffic, is it coming, like which one's performing better? Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Is it DuckDuckGo, Bing, right? Like within that reporting, I can then go, well, I've got more traffic coming from Google, but Bing is actually spending more time on that page. See what I'm saying here? You can really start to see the behaviors it all lines up. Or another one I find useful, especially if you're gonna be entering into a redesign or you're gonna be hiring some interns that you wanna start looking at just cleaning up the content and the look of your website a little bit, then you can do landing page and device category. So again, you can look at all of the top pages coming in, but then you can see compared to people who visited from a desktop, a tablet, or a mobile phone. This can be really critical in nonprofit work, especially if some of your content is sensitive or private in nature, right? So you may have a bigger advocacy about housing or sheltering or the unhoused. And so you have a couple of pages that you expect that the general public will come to. But maybe you also have a page that makes sense that people and clients that actually use your services from an unhousing perspective would use it on a phone. And you might wanna cross-track that data, right? Because that page might be more important for our mobile folk finding what they need because they're in a moment of urgency, right? They're trying to access the services that you provide versus general public who are just looking to find more information about what your nonprofit does. And of course, wanna dive deeper with goals because at the end of the day, you can have all this data, but if it doesn't really funnel down into the thing you want people to do on your website, then your website's something more than an interactive brochure, right? We kinda want people to sign up for that newsletter, donate, download an opt-in or white page, connect with you to grow your community and to grow your collaborative initiatives. So what Google Analytics calls these goals, and the most common one is called a destination goal, which means you have assigned a page on your site that when people land on it, you know they did something. And usually I recommend a thank you page. When someone signs up for your e-newsletter, they should go to a thank you page. Did they give you a donation? They should go to a thank you page. Did they download a white paper or case study or your AGM report, right? Then you wanna thank you page because you would know that in order for people to get the thing, they had a land on that page. And what happens is once you set up goals, there'll be more data and metrics available to you. So you can see here that in the Google demo site, they have a goal called registrations. It's not my website. I'm going to assume that they have a goal that there is a thank you page at the end that confirms that people signed up. And because they have that goal set, now they have a conversion rate for every landing page, they have a registration of how many were done and a value. Yes, you can assign a dollar value to this if you want. And now that this is in place, you can begin to reverse engineer the behavior and all those other dimensions I've taught you of, okay, this page, we have more people who, this month we had 15 more people sign up for our newsletter. Oddly enough, the only thing we did that month is we really talked about our resources page. You can go diving around here and while you might think that people come to your resources page to get resources, because you have a really great design, it's possible that the way it's designed, people are drawn to signing up for that end result. So again, having goals would give you access to a lot more of those features. For my darlings, I know I just like, it was fire, water, water hose drinking from me once again. But you can get these slides at 25-GA-Nonprofit, today's slides. And also I have a five page PDF that goes over all those reports in detail, the dashboard, how to create the goals I just mentioned and all those other great things. That's totally optional. You don't need to get it if you don't want to. So my darlings, thank you, thank you, thank you for your time. I'm gonna stop sharing and I'm happy to answer any questions that people may have in the chat. Thank you. Well, that was amazing. Thank you so much, really grateful for you to come and give us like the overview of like, what is this terrifying beast Google analytics? So questions are coming and for the rest of you who have not yet thrown your questions into the chat, put them right in there and I'll make sure I read them out for you. So we've got the first one here actually coming from Cenk who's asking like, when starting, one challenge I have seems to be not having enough data to actually compare yourself against. Is there some industry standard or KPIs that we can use to figure out whether our numbers are normal or crazy looking? That's a good one. And it's kind of hard to answer without like to have a benchmark. There is a feature inside of Google analytics in the settings where you can set up an industry benchmark. It's not perfect and depending on what you're offering, like I think it's about 55 different categories, you can sign up for that inside of the Google analytics admin area. And that can give you some idea. I think you have one, I did one in the insurance industry and that one worked out really well. So we were kind of worried that our social media wasn't working that great until we looked at the standard for all of the other insurance companies that opted in to being part of this. And we were like doing awesome. We were like, oh wow, that's fine. The other thing I would consider is think again about the flow in nature of your traffic. And you might just want to wait six months and then maybe compare that to the six months prior. So there are no standards. The only thing I would say is continuous growth is always great. Not that growth is gonna be happening forever. That's like physically impossible. But it really does depend on what you're doing. So I wouldn't focus too much on, are we higher or lower than others? I would compare yourself to yourself either quarterly, monthly, or every six months. Lovely, that's helpful. And Sarah also listed a good M&R benchmarks report as well, which is a place for you to compare specifically against I think other organizations and nonprofits, which is I think can be useful. I've got another question coming in here from Murray Leslie who's saying, at this time, should websites be designed mobile first? Like when we start thinking about that, should we start with mobile? Oh my goodness, yes, yes, yes, yes. So mobile first consideration would be that when I was, I used to teach UI UX design at NSEC IT college. I would literally tell my students, just imagine the world is one big long brick, right? So in that one big long brick idea, what is the most important thing that you wanna have out there before people get to scroll? I also wanna clarify that people will scroll. You hear people talk about above the fold and no one scrolls, bullcrap, people scroll, they don't wanna use their thumbs, they don't wanna tell their reader to scroll down, right? So absolutely, I would say mobile first design is excellent. It's the most easiest to design for because it's kind of top to bottom. And also from an SEO perspective, if you and a competing or a similar website have the exact same kind of topic and yours is mobile friendly and theirs is not, you get an extra point in search results. Because again, we're saying that we're taking care of that, right? And also mobile design usually means we're trying to load it quickly, which we're also thinking about those who have very slow internet connection. Not everybody has the beauty of having fiber op, right? So absolutely, if can go mobile first and not find a nice juicy grant, it'll help you get there. Awesome, we are now at about four minutes left. So we've got time for two questions. First from Alex. How do you translate your goals into Google Analytics trackable goals? Like how do we actually track a link into a goal conversion? So one way you can do that is it depends on the nature of what that link is going to be. So the easiest one is, as I mentioned, if someone has to enter in information that number one you're gonna get regardless of the website, if Google Analytics works or not, that you know they converted, and then you wanna make sure that they're gonna land on a page that only somebody who is in there could actually attain it to. If instead, you're just interested to see if people are going to the third blog post in a series, that can also be a destination goal. So any link on your website can be a destination goal. Conversely, if you're doing work where you're trying to like share things on social, there's something called a UTM parameter. And what a UTM parameter does is you could, I'll set the question really quickly. How do you know if you send three tweets about your homepage, which tweet is actually working the best? Because you're just sending them all to slash home, right? But when you use a UTM, you add an extra piece of code that says this is coming from Twitter and it was tweet number one. This is coming from Twitter and it was tweet number two. This is coming from Twitter is tweet number three. And that way you can actually compare your work doing with that. There's on, if you get the download or on my website in a blog post is using UTM sort of traffic growth. That would be a great resource for that question to kind of dive deeper. If you're not so interested in end conversion results, but you wanna track links better. That's the one for you. Awesome. And we have actually a final question coming in here. Let's see from Cenk, which is. So what if I get stuck? Is there a good community resource or forum for like forgetting support with Google analytics questions? Good one. I don't know of any free ones. I myself am a long time student of data driven U run by Jeff Sauer. And so you might be able to find that group on Facebook but I'm not sure if it's only limited to people who are taking this course to be other Alice's. I would say you might wanna start again. I find Facebook groups to be very valuable. I don't know of any ones I joined specifically for Google analytics, but you would wanna look for maybe some marketing groups that have a couple of gurus in there that like to have Google analytics. But I can't think top of my head. And I'm also a big fan of YouTube. Like I think YouTube is the underrated resource for free learning at your own time. So unfortunately, darling, I don't have a specific course or name or group that I could refer them to. No worries at all. Thank you so much for your time today sharing your resources. We'll make sure that all of the video, the slides, even the cheat sheet, those links are all available to you afterwards. And for people who've just slipped in, the answer is yes, we are recording this event. And so we'll make sure that this is available to you and all have that link and all those other resources available to you probably by end of day, Wednesday at the latest. Otherwise, we just hit one o'clock, which means we are now at the end. Before I let you go back to your busy lives, let me just remind you that normally we have all kinds of events lined up. We don't this time, which means the second slide. We need your help. Do you have a great idea in mind? Do you know a presenter who might be a good fit for this audience of around a topic around how can we use technology at nonprofits? Reach out to us. There's a contact form on our website and we would love to chat with you about coming and putting together another event. We can support you if you wanna be an event producer. It'll be super fun. And again, the way to reach us is if you come to our main site page and just scroll all the way down to the bottom, scroll, scroll, scroll, you'll see there's a contact form here and that'll send something to us. So that would be the next step if you wanna reach out to us. Otherwise, I am ever so grateful for your time. We will surely have more events as we work our way through the rest of the year and again, so long, farewell, I'll see you soon.