 So when I kind of start off a little antidote about a lesson I learned a long time ago. It's apropos of what we're going to be talking about today. So back, I actually kind of got accidentally thrust into enterprise web development in the tech bubble of the 90s. And what's interesting is I found myself actually working for banks doing customer self-help type websites and telephony I found myself like in these rooms suddenly with all of these consultants from Capgemini, IBM back then was Anderson Consulting you know is now a censure and people like that and we were kind of figuring out how are we building the first websites It was cool, it was the heady days of the 90s and we had big budgets for doing prototypes so we could prototype out our websites, give people tasks to do things videotape what they were doing to figure out like maybe what's the best way to build interfaces and so then we launched these websites but I always kind of felt like well we weren't really getting feedback on how people were interacting with these websites and in particular were people getting confused because most software at that time were built for power users for people you could train not for a common person just to come to a website and be able to move their funds around or move their 401Ks around the different things and so I wanted to kind of so I started creating some little analytics systems to help me measure where you know what was going on with the people on the websites and what's interesting is you know I was just a developer normally pretty quiet in a lot of these meetings and then suddenly I started going to these meetings and I bring some of this data with me and say hey you know I think here's a place that maybe we've got some usability issues maybe we can tighten up some of our warning messages because people might be getting confused because we're seeing too many form submissions that aren't right little things like that and what was interesting is not a salesperson and suddenly we're getting all these new budgets to make all these new fixes to things not a usability person but suddenly I was getting called on in all these meetings about either A did I have any information about you know what we're seeing on the website or B could I create some of that information so that we understand better what's going on and what I kind of found was that I actually went from being a developer after a year to being really more of a strategic partner with a lot of clients even though I really had no background and didn't even really intend to do it simply because I had good data and made common sense sort of common sense sort of assumptions about what or theories about what we could do with that data and so that's kind of what I want to talk about today is how can you guys and what I find interesting is that in today's world when we build websites it's a lot of heuristics it's a lot of people who you know go to all these conferences and learn all these best practices and stuff like that there's not much data that people are using and you find that you'll learn some really interesting things when you start to weave more what I call results oriented data into your projects so I kind of like to model out a successful website what I call results oriented website it's one that is designed to attract and then it engages sort of builds trust until it can convert converting is a thing that the stakeholders want to happen and of course there's a lot of websites that are built this way what we're really talking about today is how do we build these websites even better so the tricky part is that you've got something like Google Analytics if you want to go back to that slide so one great way to get data is Google Analytics the tricky part about it is if you just install Google Analytics you're going to get some decent data about how well a website's attracting people or how many people are coming to the website but you really don't get much good information about conversion really no information out of the box about conversion and very little information about really engagement you get a little information about maybe time on site and stuff like that which can be even misleading high time on site can mean you actually have bad usability on the website because people aren't finding things but there are ways to extend Google Analytics to get to those types of numbers that stakeholders really want the tricky part and this is not a hole in Google Analytics at all the problem is that they basically out of the box you get everything that every website would want and it's 200 different data points it's an incredible amount of data but ultimately when we look at conversions different types of websites want to attract different kinds of things and so it has to be custom set up so they've given us a tool to do this but we still have got to implement it and come up with a plan for it and so the first step in tracking the success of a website is what we call a measurement plan and so a measurement plan basically says what are the objectives of the business and how can we measure them and ideally can we put them into Google Analytics I'm going to kind of use that as a single tool a lot of times the data might be in some different types of analytic systems but for now I like to just kind of put everything into one system and so we want to figure out like what are the types of things like form submissions maybe clicking on special types of links what's measurable and what can we push forward some things get trickier like tracking phone calls normally got to bring in a third party system you know to help with those kinds of things but we want to develop this measurement plan and once we understand what kind of objectives we should be measuring for the success of our websites and our efforts we can put it into Google Analytics using something called the goal system and so the way goals work is when you first install Google Analytics there's no goals in the site but you can go and configure them so like say you want to track a form submission you can go in and you just give a goal in name you go into the Google Admin and name something like sales submission maybe it's a sales demo request or something like that and normally what you could an easy pattern that's pretty popular is when someone submits the form it goes to a thank you page and you set up a URL and you say okay whenever someone hits this URL trigger this goal and so now every time someone submits the form the goal is triggered the other thing that's really kind of interesting is that or just to note is that goals will only count once per session each goal so different forms and that's actually kind of good because if someone say hits the back button and hits that thank you page again we don't want the goal to trigger again or if someone submits the form again it's not like they really got any more benefit out of the second time they did it so in general it's good behavior that they only trigger once per session and when I say session basically the way Google Analytics tracks all these hits that happen on a website and it groups them together in a session so when someone first hits the website that's the start of a session and basically it collects everything someone does until there's a by default a 30 minutes nothing happens and then it says okay we're shutting out this session and everything that happened during that time that's now as a part of our session you can change it from 30 minutes but generally most people just leave the default one of the things that's pretty interesting about goals is you can pass a value and Google Analytics tracks its value or interprets its value kind of interestingly they interpret it sort of like as a currency because they're basically trying to encourage you to say what is the value of this thing happening in business terms I sometimes like to use the term utility because some people kind of get hung up that I don't know exactly what a lead's worth or I don't know exactly what you know certain things are worth but it is sort of meant that it's something we want to drive towards and so I kind of look as like level one analytics is just installing Google Analytics level two and it's a big jump is you know getting your goals going so you know you might very well have a lead generation website and you're tracking form submissions and maybe you're tracking phone calls but in reality phone calls are maybe only half as effective at generating sales as a form might be that's where that value can come into play so instead of just saying oh well you know we want to understand say what blog posts are you know just doing the most conversions we can weight them so we might say okay well our form is 200 and since we get half the conversion from phone calls we're going to make that worth 50 and ideally what I like to do you can think of it as just a way to weight and just kind of have like a random you know just kind of like a abstract set of units but ideally I like to try to if you can bring it back to what's the value to the organization you know sometimes if you're doing leads you might very well say well you know every lead we get is worth this you know the customer is worth this you can convert one in four and you can kind of like work the math back depends on what you're tracking as far as how you might want to do it and it can be tricky but I encourage it it's a good exercise just to do it and what I find is this is an area where people will find it a little tricky doing this but you know because as humans we want very accurate numbers and a lot of times it's hard we're going to make a lot of assumptions on how we're going to value our goals but you know I'd say it's much better it's more meaningful you know sort of the old adage of the person looking for their lost keys where there's bright light instead of where they actually lost them you know just because there's bright light around accuracy we really want we just want to have some good estimate and we can always iterate on it later so the stakeholders they're going to love knowing these numbers these ROI oriented numbers around these big macro conversions happening but the people who work on the websites the people, the marketers, the people generating content those kinds of people a lot of times they want to track other things they call micro conversions actually I shouldn't say I at Google if you go through some of the Google training they'll talk about the same thing and what a lot of times micro conversions are is they might be showing progression towards a conversion or they might be something that provides value in a different way so a lot of times if you're doing a good job in content marketing you might become an authority and if people aren't necessarily going to buy from you but are champions of your brand sharing your content and so someone doing a social share might provide value it's not necessarily directly related to an end goal but it still provides value and so a lot of times it's good to set these things up is what I call micro conversions the tricky part about micro conversions is that goals are not normally the best way to track them we only have about 20 of them so let's say we were going to track social shares and you were going to try to track Twitter and Facebook and whatever you can run out of these goals pretty quickly the other things are only counted once per session and so there is another way that we can count these things using another subsystem in Google Analytics called events and so events actually are a lot more sophisticated than goals we can actually kind of attach three different levels of data instead of just a name we basically have like a category and action and a label we have a value just like we do with goals and we can also add extra data using custom dimensions I won't get too much into it because it's a little advanced but it's something we can do and we basically have an unlimited number of these things we don't even need to set them up in Google Analytics like we do goals we just use JavaScript to push them over you can use tag manager or just do JavaScript on your website to do those kinds of things and so you know what I like to do is let's track every meaningful interaction on the website as an event how far people scroll down pages how far people scroll through videos if they click on CTAs click on go to a social profile, those different types of things want to set those up and track they don't have to be custom done there are no events right out of the box in Google Analytics you have to implement them custom and so what I like to do is that level two analytics you've got your goals all set up and you've got them valued is now taking your micro conversions and scoring those also to kind of give some fine detail that the UX people and other people working on the website are a lot of times interested in and so a lot of times I even sometimes like to score some traffic metrics and then I normally do score engagement and sort of trust building as events and then our big macro goals as conversions so there's a little bit of a hack that I figured out a few years ago the one tricky part is that events don't actually the value doesn't track the same way value doesn't a goal and I want them to like for if say someone shares in social and I associate 10 with it I want to be kind of considered like utility value and so actually kind of a simple hack to do this is make track everything you can with events and I like to use a convention of putting a plus if it is meant to trigger a goal and I put an explanation point if that value is meant to be interpreted as utility this gets a little advanced so there's some things that are kind of on the more beginner side there's some things on the more advanced side so don't worry if you don't get all of it the video will be up and you can kind of come back and look at some of these more advanced things later but this is a little bit of I think a great way to learn some good information so for example if I've got a video scroll is going to basically tell me how deep someone scrolls into a video and I might want to be a percentage and I just represent that percentage as 0 to 100 or something like that and so what I can do is I can have the name of this event be video scroll and then normally what I want to do is I'll have the title of the video and an ID of the video so it's like a YouTube I might have it like YouTube colon and the YouTube hash ID for it that way if I ever need to I can run a report of all my videos on the website and get an average of how deep people are scrolling into them and I want to trigger a goal would look something like this a form gets submitted we want to trigger the sales submission so I put a plus and I have goals that are set up to look for that sort of pattern where it basically has the word sales submission with a plus at the end and then what's kind of neat about this is because we didn't just do a regular goal as a URL we can associate things like which form got submitted and you could actually pass another event that might be form view and you can divide the actual submissions by the views and things like that's why I like to put some sort of identifier on the event so I can like compare those things later on and then like the social share this one simply is going to be social share we want to count this as utility value and so I put an explanation point at the end and so that way when I run my reports I can later say no I want to do my reports where I'll total up all the goal values and any events that have an explanation point and contribute them back to whatever it is on the website that's driving that kind of value so we've kind of looked at metrics how the big take away from that is just need to look at measuring the things interactions that define success on the website and ideally put values around it to weight how important these things are and all the numbers in Google Analytics really fall into two categories there are dimensions the data in Google Analytics falls into two categories so we looked at metrics first we're not going to look at dimensions and the way I like to kind of think of it is dimensions are dimensions are kind of like buckets and every time something happens metrics are like putting a marble into that bucket so let's say for example someone comes to the website and they start by going to bloga well it's going to put we're going to put a session marble in the bucket we're going to put a page hit in the bucket if next they go to another blog post they have a page hit go into that bucket if let's say they see a call to action for a e-book someone wants to download then they can go to that offer they submit the form maybe they go to blog c and then they leave the website after that and so you know these are dimensions and buckets now if you were if we just had sort of that level zero analytics with no goal setup this is what we have but because we did set up a goal our goal would have triggered here and so let's say we valued someone submitting that form is 25 what's neat about this is now we can actually attribute that value upstream so we attribute that value to the page people came in on so we could then look at okay let's look at all the different blog posts we have which ones are creating the most value because the way that value maps back so what's neat is there's a ton of dimensions just available right out of the box of Google Analytics the content ones are pretty self-explanatory pretty straightforward it is kind of neat though that you can look at like sort of like just a in session page path or a landing page meaning this is the first page of a session also you can look at traffic sources which a lot of you know people doing marketing are constantly looking at these and what's really neat is if you set up all your success metrics you can do things like I want to look at all the value organic searches delivering versus say PPC or if you're doing PPC your keywords will be coming through and you can look at the value each keyword is producing and if you know what you're paying of course you're going to know what you're paying for them so they can kind of start to calculate an ROI on those there's a lot of other segments you can look at audiences one of my favorite things to look at is devices even though we're all doing these responsive sites a lot of times the usability and sort of the customer journey kind of like the customer journey mapping gets a little lost sometimes particularly in the tablet sizes and so a lot of times you can do things like okay I want to look at everyone who's looked at the website on mobile phones tablet size and desktop and do I see a significant drop in value that one of these sizes is doing might need to be looking at some of my UX the typical thing happens is you know you might have a right column CTA and in a mobile size it drops down below the content and people don't see it so it might not show up so you know a lot of times that is a good way to identify some issues along those lines but there's a bunch of others there's some cool ones around page speed so you can actually look at okay if my page loads in this amount of time or if it's this amount of time to get to first write or to get to full render or things like that how much does my value drop off on my website and so it might be the argument for tuning some things up maybe installing you know responsive images or lazy loading things like that moving to a different host along those lines and start to understand some of those and so it's fine to kind of just explore through all the different dimensions they have Google Analytics has another really powerful system we can define our own dimensions called custom dimensions and given that we have a CMS we can push some things from the CMS over to Google Analytics and look at some pretty interesting types of breakdowns so custom dimensions basically you set them up in Google Analytics and you define a scope it's either a hit scope session or visit a couple of examples and so you define them in Google Analytics but then you use JavaScript once again to send them over and you get 20 of these for property and they can be up to 150 characters long so what I love to do is so out of the box when we set up our success metrics we know for example all the blog posts how much value they're producing but we might not necessarily know why what is it about those blog posts that is producing that value maybe it's the way the author writes it's the topic maybe it's the tone that we're using a casual versus corporate tone or something like that well we can push this data over into Google Analytics and then we can break it back and so it might be hey I've got 14 blog posts that are written by this one author and 28 that are written by another author and I can look at the total value of all of them divided by the number of posts and I can get a pretty good handle on who's writing better posts in fact actually at our agency we used that and it sort of gamified it so we're supposed to write a couple posts every month and they all got pretty competitive about the business value suddenly their posts were delivering so those are fairly straightforward now the next two are a little bit more advanced I'll just say them for so you know what's possible they're a little bit trickier to set up but visitor attributes you can do things like hey if someone shares on our website we might label them as a social share and then we can segment out what those types of people are doing you can actually do things like what topics people are looking at and kind of figure out what topic is someone interested in and then you can break that down by okay let's look at say people who are hunters versus people who are gatherers you know because they're looking at that type of content what types of change and behavior are we seeing on our website you got system status so is someone a user what user role are they are they a subscriber something like that and then you can ask for certain data in form fields someone's job role psychographics demographic so forth push this custom dimensions into Google Analytics session attributes are an interesting one there's not a ton of I find less use form but the few use cases I found form are very powerful one they could be used for sort of AB multi variant testing and so what I call concurrent split tests and so even if you're using something like a visual web optimizer what I like to do is even though what visual web optimizers might have a control a variant one I want to push that data as a session in as a session variable into Google Analytics they do some deeper analysis with it and so that's all that really means that you know a concurrent split test is people come to the website and a certain percentage of people are shown one variant and other people are shown another variant what's really powerful and I think it's lost a lot is what I call release testing release testing is basically a split test where the control is the way the website was in the prior version and then you release a new version and that's your now new version and so if you're if you push that hey here's the version of our website we're on you can then compare how did we do in version one verse version two or one point one you know verse one point two and so forth and what's really neat about this is that you know doing continuous integrations tough when you get into like enterprise type sites things like B-hat tests and I mean maintaining all of that let's make sure the look of the site looks perfect all this kind of stuff it can get pretty complex it's pretty expensive to maintain and I think it's really out of the budget of most like mid-size organizations but this is actually a good way that hey you launch the new website did we see a significant drop in our usability might be because we broke something you know maybe we updated a module and broke one of our forms a good smoke test and even if you know the product owner comes this oh you guys this color changed on our website or something like that we know what to make the argument yeah but we're not seeing any different difference in value that's being produced after we did that release so it's not really having an impact so we'll go ahead and we'll go ahead and correct that one of the other things I like to do is I do responsive breakpoints so because Google doesn't know where your breakpoints are in your responsive themes so you basically say if I've got a browser below this then I want to be extra small small medium so forth and then you can break down your reports and maybe see if there's maybe a certain breakpoints in our responsive design that might have some issues so what do we do with all of this dating you know we've got all these success metrics measuring the important interactions on our website and then we've extended our dimensions so we can segment down and look deeper into certain areas what do we do with this information so I've always kind of like this idea is that the ultimate goal is to drive this data to make sure the entire team or the entire organization is learning and getting smarter about how to do web development so there's a book that came out several years called The Fifth Discipline that's basically about how you create learning organizations and the first thing is you've got to have smart people making good decisions you've got to have good mental models so it's the idea that you go to conferences you learn hey this is the best way to do this design or this is the best way to do UX or this is the best marketing channel the best way to do these different things and it's always a good place to start but what you need to do regularly is be challenging those mental models because they're not always the same across all kinds of different sites and sometimes they just change and so we can use data to challenge our mental models and improve on them you also want to share vision this is one of the areas that I think is interesting particularly you can do a larger website where you've got the developers that are worried about things like technical debt and complexity security things along those lines and you've got the UX people that looking to do trendy stuff sometimes and things that are interesting and you've got the usability people that might be trying to make things simple but sometimes at the expense of emotional branding on the site and so what I like about using data is to say no we're going to use this sort of ROI number this utility value to drive our decision making now that doesn't mean that you don't care anymore about technical debt and those kinds of things but now you've got something to weigh it against and then team learning and so that's what I think like having that number having that number where people can see hey we just made these changes to the website what kind of effect did it have you know and they'll learn people start to pick up that hey these kinds of things are things we want to look for but one of the biggest things we want to do is develop a culture of systems thinking and I'll show you a little bit of like how I like to think of a website so to kind of think of a website of systems thinking is that we've got this website sort of like a black box we can't observe exactly what people are doing on it but we can observe our inputs and outputs and in particular what we want to see is what happens when we change an input what does it do to our outputs and so you know the typical way of building a website you get your requirements you've got your best practices and mental models and features people are coming to the website content you're adding to the website and then we want to do is we use Google Analytics with our goals, the built-in analytics and events to measure the output ideally we can value them so we've got sort of a single number to look at one of the great things about a single number is it's something that most people can really understand instead of looking at a bunch of different types of metrics if someone is a designer, someone is not necessarily a data oriented person having that single number to look at is good feedback loop so feedback loops so we've talked pretty much all about the collection side of Google Analytics there's the reporting side there's a lot of good stock reports in Google Analytics but you can get pretty bewildering generally what I find is that there's maybe a two or three go to reports but beyond that you're generally going to create a custom report so there's a quick way to create custom reports it's an older way of doing it but it's pretty powerful and then there's the newer data studio which is very powerful you can bring data in from other sources and all kinds of interesting things but it's got a learning curve to it so a lot of times I find it might just be easier to export and put it into Excel and put some things together and then there is a data API which allows other systems to read this data so what I like to do is we've got to pick some inspection points so it kind of looks like those websites are just a project or someone says we want to build this website and we want it to be good for five years and then we'll redesign it five years from now we're not going to do anything else to it and these people some of these people really should be continually improving their website they just don't realize it so what I like to do with these people is let's figure out the important things to measure let's put this analytics setup on their website and then let's go back to them in a quarter or six months and say hey here's an opportunity we might think for improving this and it's interesting how many people have moved from thinking their site was just a project to realizing no there's actually a lot of things that we can do to improve the site using data then there's a second level site where it's like okay we're going to basically build all the features we want in one sort of waterfall project but we're going to do continual marketing in particular we're going to do content marketing we're adding content, we're doing SEO doing social engagement and things like that and a lot of times we find there's going to be an editorial calendar planning so you're planning your content and so forth or maybe there could be things like content optimization meetings or things like that that's a great time to bring that data in particularly if you're doing good segmentation around those pages ideally if you're on a big project where they say no we're continually going to be building this website ideally in something like Scrum bring the data to your backlog grooming and splint planning meetings basically where you're saying what's going to be the next important thing we're going to tackle and so if you're using a waterfall method there's analogies to it that's just kind of called different things and then one of the other things I would actually like to do is to bring this stuff into the user interface of the CMS itself because that's where a lot of people live like I said one of the coolest things I ever saw happen kind of unintended is when I deployed a system to help do this and it put a tab on everyone's blog posts where they could see a scorecard of the business value their blog posts were doing suddenly they started self-organizing and gamifying around building better blog posts because they could see the data so adapting I like to change that mentality of hey let's try to you know let's build this great feature to think of like we think this feature is a hypothesis and we need to test it and sometimes you test it using AB sometimes like hey this we think is so great we're going to just release it we're going to do the release style testing to test did it really improve or not improve our website but it's just that mentality of when we make changes we need to think of them as experiments as hypotheses that need to be proven regularly analyzed to uncover value and a lot of times it's going to be hey let's look at some bigger reports and then if we see something interesting happen let's dig down and get down into our dimensions to maybe figure out like why that's going on use the value that number to focus the team and help them prioritize and be focused around one idea so this is kind of a concept that we used to implement in the late 2000s type time frame and then eventually this is a lot of work to do this manually so I started a project and I'm actually a Drupal developer originally so it was in Drupal back in like 2012-2013 and we actually people asked us to port it to WordPress so we did and so basically we basically built a system to help help these things happen it's a plugin and I was just going to show it to you guys real quick if anyone wants to get involved in this project you know either just feedback we've got a lot of backlog ideas on what we want to do and be good to have some direction on how people are using it or if you're actually a developer you know and want to get involved or document or anything like that just show it kind of real quick so one of the first things we do is there's a whole API system for doing events so like if there's another plugin or if you've got a theme and you want to track certain things you can just hook into the system and whenever you install it those events will start automatically happening in Google Analytics wanted to make it really easy to do things like set up goals so we kind of created some interfaces where it'll automatically go from WordPress and you don't have to go into Google Analytics to set up the goal it'll do it automatically from WordPress and then make it available as like drop down so you can just set them on things like different form submissions maybe different types of link clicks things along those lines it's called intelligence yep it's well intelligence WP yeah so that's the website intelligencewp.com it's just intelligence plugin slash intelligence on WordPress.org then wanted to way we're sort of like here's our scorecards here's all the different events we think are important and we can look at like what are all the values we're going to associate with all of these things and then allowing things like you can customize them at a form level and so forth and then bringing the reports back into back into WordPress and particularly what we're trying to do is get people away from vanity metrics it's just hits and sticks and stuff like that and get them focused on value that's being delivered and kind of breaking that down into traffic value sort of that micro conversions and macro conversion value and then we do things like make it easy to compare different types of content so you can say I want to compare just all the different blog posts and things like that because we're pushing all that stuff through again doing something where like every you know authors can see a scorecard of the business value their contents generating just off their blog post and then doing things like making it easy to dig down into segments so like for example it's a little hard to read but the top one we're breaking reports down by content types this one's by authors so and see which authors are delivering the most value this one's like number of words in an article for like what length of article is kind of optimal this one's the words are all blurry but that one's all topics basically category taxonomies and stuff like that so hope that was helpful that's what I got if you guys have any questions thanks for watching but I looked at Google Analytics I set it up on everybody's site that I do and then I go away I just want to have it work so now I know a little bit more about when I go to the console you're talking about kind of custom dimensions you said dimensions so out of the box there's a bunch of built in dimensions do you repeat the question? so the question is are dimensions a part of Google Analytics built into Google Analytics right so the dimension concept is actually core to Google Analytics and then it basically has ways of doing some stock ones so a perfect example is going to be there's a dimension called device and device can be mobile tablet or desktop and it will automatically track those for you but you can also have custom dimensions so one thing that Google Analytics doesn't know is what the breakpoints of your themes are when I say breakpoints normally there's like say five breakpoints and you've got desktop and then down to mobile so it doesn't know so what you can use a custom dimension to do is to basically say for any viewport that's this size I want to push extra small and for this viewport size I want to push small medium large and extra large something like that and so that way that's like basically a customized dimension that you created for custom information from your website so things like pushing things like a blog author Google Analytics doesn't understand what that is it's not something that's built in but you can create a custom dimension that's author and then you can push the author of your posts and that might require JavaScript and now you can start segmenting your reports down by authors and that might require JavaScript it will require JavaScript now that's another thing like if you use intelligence it automatically handles all that stuff so it will automatically start pushing your authors and you can set taxonomies and all that stuff in the admin so a lot of this is sort of like how people didn't have to use JavaScript to do a lot of this kind of stuff we're still going into the Google Analytics console to set up those parameters or intelligence no it will set it all up automatically for you yeah so you're asking if you use intelligence do you still have to go into Google Analytics and set those things up, not the current versions in the early days you did but yeah the current version when you first set it up it will do all your custom dimensions for you and then it will automatically start pushing all that extra data along and so that was one of the big things I'm going to make it a lot easier so I'm not having to jump back and forth between Google Analytics you can set a lot of that stuff either up automatically because there is like an API a management API for Google Analytics so it's just using the management API for Google Analytics to allow configuration out of WordPress to make the changes to your Google Analytics account yeah if you use like Google campaign tracking source media and all that from there you can connect to the values that you put so with that campaign they fill that form out yeah great question so the question was so you can customize for those that don't know what UTM parameters are you can customize there's something called a campaign which is not normally set but if you control the link you can put like a question mark UTM underscore campaign and you can say pass hey there's a PPC campaign or this is like our Christmas special campaign and then it will it will track all of that back in the end those UTM parameters are just dimensions and so this stuff gets tracked back to all all the dimensions so just like value gets tracked back to medium and source even though you're kind of custom implementing on the campaign it will track back all of those yeah with the intelligence app the plugin, how heavy is it on a website and if you for example take it off your website does it still keep everything in Google Analytics so what it actually will do is it actually creates so the question is how heavy is it and does it if you remove it would everything still be in Google Analytics so yes in fact one of the reasons we created it was because there's some really cool analytics you get out of marketing automation platforms like HubSpot or Marketo or Eloqua stuff like that but the problem is we had clients that kept changing platforms and they didn't want to lose their data and so we're like let's just do like CTA tracking stuff like that and let's move into Google Analytics so that way when we move platforms we can keep that data so the data is there if you remove it it will stop tracking some of that stuff and actually the way it works is if you already have Google Analytics on your website it will actually create a second Google Analytics account that's configured because it configures things a special way so it won't mess up any of your current configuration although if that current configuration is blank you can do things like copy goals over and then track them in both and in Google Analytics you can track into multiple Google Analytics tracking IDs and so then if you uninstall it your other Google Analytics is just tracking normal the data will always stay there I mean you own the Google Analytics account but the data going into it would stop if you removed it you know that's an interesting question you know so it's actually a pretty direct port from a Drupal module I mean a lot of code is the same I have not noticed a major slowdown or I haven't noticed a significant slowdown but there's sometimes a little bit and the thing is and this is where a little bit of my lack in WordPress knowledge like in Drupal everything's cached so if it takes 300 milliseconds more to build a page it's no big deal because it's all going into cache and reverse proxy and so forth which I'm assuming most WordPress is set up that way also and like when I host my WordPress site to do on Pantheon so their stuff's all set up to do the reverse proxy caching so it doesn't really it doesn't really make any sort of impact but most time it might add 150 milliseconds, 200 milliseconds something like that to a page load for a link to your slides oh yeah you guys are recording this all the videos are going to be they'll look free once they're complete I don't know but I think each instructor's option on how to share slides if they want to okay do this I normally post on slideshare so I'm like slideshare tomdude or something like that actually I have my slideshare up there I don't I'll post it up to slideshare if someone wants to then just email me using the email address on there oh my gosh I actually have a really old email address on there that'll still get to me yeah I'll tweet it out when I you know when I do it when I post it can I ask a question this might be really safe but I'm kind of new to I've got my website and it's a very tall there's one line that says you need to configure Google and Windows um is that intelligent? that's probably related to some plugin or theme you have it's separate I know it is what I'm curious about is with that one line does that mean I should click on it and it's going to set it up for me or generally no so the question is the website is telling you that you need to install Google Analytics if you click the link will it set it up for you um so you actually have to create at least one Google Analytics account because you got to go through all the Google Analytics um permissions and terms of use and all of that kind of stuff there are some plugins that intelligence does this actually once you've created the first one it then can create any extra ones after that if you've already created a Google Analytics account but you'll always have to create one because a plugin won't have permission to understand where to create it otherwise yeah and probably what that link would do is take you right to Google Analytics where you create the account and it's a pretty if you've already got a Google um profile it's a pretty painless process to create a Google Analytics account and it's not even bad if you don't have a profile you've got to create the profile first then the Analytics account ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok right ok ok ok ok ok ok o What do you need to upgrade to premium to install it? From premium to business. Oh, from premium to business to install Google Analytics. You know, I'm not familiar enough with how WordPress.com is set up. So I don't 100% know. It would probably be odd, though, that you couldn't add it some way, and there's so many different ways to do it. It might be, though, that they might have some sort of field, and you can't use like their particular field, you might have to add it as a widget, you know, or something like that. Do you need a widget? Yeah. And I'm sure if you Google it, there'll be tons of people who have an answer for it if there's a way to do it. Because that seems like something people write a lot about. But yeah, I don't know enough about the WordPress.com platform to tell you one way or the other. Okay. Oh, yes. Can you consolidate in the sense that you basically want to have multiple websites act as like a single property? Oh, and he's asking the question, can you consolidate the data for multiple sites? And so you're saying like, maybe like a company has got five different websites and they want to track across all five of those websites. Okay. There is a way to do it, depending on what you're trying to do. The tricky part is this. Google is going to do all of its tracking through first party cookies, which have to be set by JavaScript on that domain. So as soon as you go to another, now if they're all subdomains, it's not a problem. There's a way to set what the cookie domain is. And if everything's set up as subdomains, you don't have to do anything special. You do one thing. Set the cookie value. In fact, actually, intelligence has a way that you can set it also. And you just say, don't set it at a subdomain level. Set it at a domain level. And that way, the cookie will track people at all the subdomains. But if you've got multiple domains, the problem is the cookie will get lost when people go from one domain to the other. There is a way to correct for it. It's a little tricky, though. And I forget exactly. It's been a long time since I've done the process. Basically, there's a special type of URL. And you have to encode some extra things in the URLs that go from one site to another site. And that way, that information is what allows Google Analytics to seem together the sessions across those. There are some other sort of advanced techniques for doing that. There's kind of some ways to use an iframe to kind of maintain your sessions across. But it can get a little tricky. But like I said, the Google official way to do it is they call it like cross-site tracking or something like that. But it does involve modifying your links going between those sites. How many good time for one or two? If there are quick questions, I'll hand here and a hand here. OK. I'm just building off what he said. Couldn't you use Google Data Studio to build reports? Yes. Yeah, you're right. So I wouldn't put it all into the same data set. But you could create re... Oh, the question was, could you use Data Studio to pull together multiple sites? And yes, thanks for bringing that up. So because it might not be a good idea to have it actually broken down into different data sets. But with Data Studio, you can bring multiple data sets. Not even just Google Analytics. I mean, you can bring data from all kinds of different sources into it. So yeah, you can easily say, I want this report from this data set, this report from this data set, and this. So you can create sort of like a universal dashboard or something like that for a client or what have you. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, everybody. This gentleman said his question was answered already. So please, we'd love your feedback, miketalk.rocks. And let's give time a hand.