 All right, well, hi everyone. Welcome to our webinar on Optimizing Google Analytics Using Custom Dashboard. As Brian mentioned, I'm Danielle Rebar, the website and Publications Manager at Northwest Justice Project in Washington State. One of my main responsibilities is maintaining the Washington's Law Health website. So we've teamed up with Pro Bono and are about halfway through a two-year TIG grant we received from LSE, which has enabled us to work with a very knowledgeable analytics consultant, Josh Anderson, who has set up some very useful custom dashboards and reports for us. So we'll be starting out the webinar with Josh giving an overview of the dashboards that we've created. And then I'll highlight some of the things that I've learned about our Law Help site from the dashboard. And finally, Sam Halpert, the Law Help Coordinator at Pro BonoNet, will talk a bit about using Google's Universal Analytics for custom LH3 reports in ways we can manipulate that data. But before we get into Josh's presentation, I wanted to highlight the goals we had for this project. We wanted to create an easy way for statewide website administrators to access specialized website metrics. We wanted to discover user stories, so how users learn of our website and get and what content they engage with and how once they get there. We wanted to identify potential problem pages on our website and then apply those findings to improve it. And then finally we wanted to use the Universal Analytics to generate custom usage reports. So currently these reports need to be requested by Law Help managers and generated by Pro BonoNet. So the ability for state Law Help managers to create their own on-demand customized reports would be a really valuable enhancement. And Sam will talk a little bit more about us and how we're working toward that toward the end of the presentation. One quick moment. I just also wanted to remind people, I forgot to say this, we do record these. They will be posted on our YouTube channel. You're going to hear a short message from the program reminding us that these are being recorded. Sorry about that. Call recording is on. Okay so we have a pretty packed presentation so we're going to get right into Josh's overview of the dashboard. Can you hear me? Yeah. Wonderful. My name is Josh Anderson. I've been doing online marketing for about 15 years now. I've worked for companies like LexisNexis, McGraw Hill, a couple ski resorts, startups and started my career with FEMA. I'm a lawyer by trade but I got into the marketing game quite some time ago. One of the areas I've been specializing in for the last five years is analytics and that's what we're going to really cover today. So as we go through all the tactics, strategy and tactics and goals that Danielle just outlined, I really want everyone to really concentrate on three areas. The ABCs of analytics. So A, for acquisition. Where is our traffic coming from? So what sources or mediums are driving people to the site? B, behavior. How do the visitors to the site behave once they get there? Do they engage in site search? What contents do they visit? What sites? What flows do they go through? What areas of the site do they exit from? And then C, conversions. And conversions can really be anything that your organization names. We've divided into two sections, events and goals. We'll do a deep dive into events later on in the presentation. Events and goals can really be anything you want. Things like, did someone call a phone number? Did they fill out a contact form? Did they register? Did they visit our donation page? Did they make a donation? Are they now a social connection? Do they share our content? Did they download a useful PDF? Or did they click on a link that goes to a third party site that we recognize as a reliable resource for the individuals? So one of the main parts of this project was creating custom reports as well as dashboards. And the first thing we're going to cover are dashboards. So dashboards are really a collection of widgets. You can see a screenshot here. Each of those three columns has two boxes, and those boxes are what we call widgets. And the nice thing about dashboards is you can really make them anything you want. And so you can create a dashboard for many different people in your organization. So for the leaders of the organization or the executive team, you can have what's called a general dashboard, and that'll give you a nice view of the health of your site. But for the technical team, you may want something that just speaks to their needs, such as when is the site being overloaded or where is their broken page or how long is the average page team below. And really why dashboards are powerful is they do give you that overview of the most important stats to you or the creator. And we're going to do, now I'm going to show you a couple examples of the dashboards we created. We created quite a few. We're only going to look at three today, but within the notes of the presentation, you'll find links to all these dashboards. And I'm going to show you later on how you can bring those dashboards into your Google Analytics profile. So I'm going to just jump over to Google Analytics real quick. So the first question most people ask is how do I find dashboards? So a lot of times you'll come to this opening page and you won't see it, the menu. The menu is just over here on the left. There's a pair of expands. And then these are your main areas of the menu. There's a section called dashboards. And within that section, you have private and shared. Shared dashboards are dashboards that anyone who has access to your Google Analytics profile can see. And private dashboards are one that are just local to you. And you're the only one that can view this. Or we're going to concentrate on shared dashboards. So here you'll see all the dashboards we created for this project so far. I'm just going to jump to the general dashboard. And the goal, I'm going to give it a second below for you guys because I'm sure a few seconds behind. The goal of the general dashboard was really to give a top level view of how the website is performed. So you'll see on the right side, we start with total users. That's just what that is. That's the total users to the site during that time period. But right underneath that, the more useful stat is really total users by day. So you can kind of see the flow. So if you expanded the time period, you can see where are their dips, probably around holidays, where are their spikes? Well, you'll see spikes in areas like family law, especially divorce information, right around the new year. And it enables you to identify trends or patterns that happen over long periods of time. The next area of this dashboard was we want to look at how many users that come to the site are new users versus returning users. And why that's that's important is there you'll you'll see later on this dashboard. We want to find areas that are sticky where areas of the site that people find particularly useful and visit repeatedly. The next section of the dashboard is just the visualization of the traffic throughout the United States coming to the site. So you might think that you're only catering to people within your state. But what we found was you'll actually see a lot of people from outside the state who have legal issues within the state seeking information. Another section of the dashboard, the top sections area is really concentrated around what are the top sections of the site that people are really looking into. And you can see what we mean by section sections are high level areas like family law, housing, consumer debt, protection and abuse. Where are they going to? Next area that we wanted to look at was where the top pages of the site excluding the obvious ones. So we know that the homepage is usually the most popular followed by the search section of the site. So what we did was we set up a filter to exclude those. I'm going to give it a second to Lowe's here. What you should be seeing now is the system that controls what data is being displayed in this dashboard. And you can see here, under filters, we click don't show homepage, which is represented by the slash and slash search, which is the URL string for those two pages. And then what that does is it filters those out. So we're only viewing really the top sections of the site. And these two bars are representing two different types of users. The blue bar represents new visitors to the site and the green bar is representing returning visitors. And the interesting information here is there's really certain sections of the site have a stickier grab than others when it comes to returning visitors. So for some reason, the family law sections are getting a higher proportion of people who have been to the site more than once. The next area of this dashboard we want to cover was the top exit pages. And that's just what that is, either just the pages on the site where people left. I'm gonna move a little quicker because we got a couple more dashboards to cover. But as you can see, the general dashboard is really just that very general. So the next pie chart you see is where the traffic sources, or the mediums. And this is the last widget I'm going to cover on this dashboard. And really what this is is users by total events and by source. So what we consider an event on the Washington Law Health site, and I believe it's through all the the Law Health site is anyone that downloads a resource, so PDF or a Word document or anyone that clicks on a third party link that goes to another partner site that has information that we've deemed is appropriate to these audiences. The interesting thing to see in this dashboard is you're able to, or this widget in this dashboard is you're able to identify sources that really bring you high quality traffic. And when I say high quality traffic, what I'm referring to is traffic that comes to your site and actually fulfills an event or up to the version in this case. So one to look at this court site, courtswashington.gov. It's almost a one to one ratio of users to people who did an event. So almost everyone that comes to the site through this Washington site is actually downloading a PDF or a Word document or clicking on a link to a third party site. And the reason I bring this up is these are the type of things, insights you can gain. And then you can say, well, how can I make my site more useful to the general public? Well, I can make sure that the relationship I have with these sources that lead to higher conversions are strong. And I can do that by sending them collateral on a regular basis. I can send them up to date logos, make sure that the links are working on their site to our site, asking them to partner in newsletters, things like that. So for the second time, I'm going to leave the general dashboard and I jump over to the SEO dashboard. The SEO dashboard is really a dashboard that the number one source of traffic to the site as we saw on the general dashboard is organic traffic. So we wanted to really be able to dive into that source of traffic because it represents the largest pool of users. So here what we have is the total number of users that come from organic traffic. And this widget is easily set up by putting in the filter, the metric is users, the filter is only show medium containing organic. This is only going to show users that came from organic traffic. And as you'll see, you don't really have to know all these filters because the dashboards we built are shareable. So when we share these out, and as I said, the URL strings for these are in the presentation itself, you'll be able to import them into your your analytics system yourself. So again, some of the dashboards have many things in common. We start with the total number of users, we then look at it day by day. One of the things we wanted to, we know that the top key words setting traffic to the site revolve the word Washington. So we wanted a way to view these widgets because one of the limitations of these widgets is you can only view up to 10 rows. So we split up our top key words. First, we're showing the top key words that use the word Washington in the phrase. And the widget right underneath that is then showing the top key keyword phrases that don't use the word Washington. Again, just trying to get you into the head of the user to find out what are the searches that these people are doing? And do I have confidence that can rank well for this and will satisfy their needs? We then created quite a few other widgets. We wanted to concentrate in some of the bigger geographical locations we see our traffic. So Seattle is obviously the biggest location, biggest city that we see traffic from. We actually created a widget just to show us the local SEO traffic coming from Seattle that didn't include the word Washington in any way in it. And then you can see below that there's a widget that just breaks out city by city, how much organic traffic is coming from that, and what's the average time of the site. Not going to jump for the sake of time to the next dashboard we created, which was top section sites. The idea here was when you're on the Washington Wall help, we have all these main sections of the website, but we really wanted to know what sections with an easy view, what sections lead at the most traffic. Then we wanted to dive in and see what topical areas within these sections were getting the most traffic. So the first widget in this dashboard. And one of the things you can do when you customize these dashboards, is you can control the layout. So the last two dashboards I show you were three column dashboards. And in this case, because it's more conducive to the eye, we made a one column dashboard. So there's one column dashboard we start with. What are the top sections? You can see family law is the top followed by housing. Now you'll notice here, and this is one of the things we're fixing, in the back end, this is in a Google Analytics issue, this is a website issue, is you see family law with a dash at the end, and then you just see family law. Both of those represent the same page or section of the site. They're just recorded because both of those can be served up right now. So this is an issue that will be resolved shortly. So after the top section, so we see family law as the biggest, followed by housing, probably followed by elder law, we then jump into the family law section. So this is just going to tell us what are the main sections of the family law section that people are exploring. The way we set up this widget, I bring up the filter for you, is we took advantage of the URL strings in the site itself. And you can see here, I'm going to jump back to the Washington Law site, it seems to be loading a little slow, but here we go. This is the URL string I'm referring to. And what you see here is there's patterns, so issues, family law. If I want to, the divorce section of this, you'll still notice the pattern within the URL string itself. Just take a second to load. We still have issues, family law, but then we have the divorce part of the string. We're really concentrating on these strings and using them to our advantage. So here you can see, we just wanted to limit this to the pages that include this and the URL string. So we sucked out the common theme between all these sections, which is this. Put it in the widget, and that allowed us to focus in on and get a report on just those pages within it. Okay, so I'm going to jump back to the presentation. The next area that we wanted to concentrate on was custom reports. The difference between a custom report and a dashboard is, dashboard recursion loop used to give you multiple views of information using those widgets that we talked about within those columns. You have many different peak sections over the dashboard that tell you something. A custom report is a report that you can create, you can pick any dimensions you want or as many as you want, and it enables you to focus in on a particular issue, topic, or metrics. So now we're going to take a quick look at some of these custom reports we created. So the first one that we really wanted to focus in on was the Washington state map. Now we know we get traffic throughout the country, but what we were interested in was what part of Washington are we getting the most traffic in, and where are parts of the state where we're getting traffic that maybe we didn't realize. So the nice part of this custom report is we have a nice visualization in the form of this map that you can roll over and get more user information as you go on to it. You can click on it and really do a deeper dive, but if you scroll down below the map that's where the real need of the information is. So you can see Seattle is the top city, but in the top location by far the traffic, but there are still our four or five other cities that get a decent amount of traffic in a 30-day period of time. Now you'll notice there are a bunch of columns within this table. Now these columns can be anything you want, and that's what's nice about a custom report. You can scroll up to the top, you can hit edit, and everything in these metric groups represent a column within that table. And so really this these custom reports can be very powerful and have a lot of information and are completely customizable to the individual. Along with the Washington State map one, we wanted to get an idea of what referrals we're sending the most traffic to the site. Now many of you who are familiar with Google Analytics know that you can go into your standard reporting section and go to referrals, but what this does is it allows you to again go in and edit the columns in the display. This is a simple one or we're just looking at unique page views by referral. But again here you can add anything you want. You could add users and hit save. And now we go from one column to two. But again these things can be anything you choose. So what this one is doing is it's really filtering out all the different traffic sources we're not interested in. So right now we're saying we're only interested in looking at referring traffic. Or referral is not a traffic source. It's actually a traffic medium. There are six traditional mediums. Organic, direct, referral. And then you have things like paid and email internal and external email. So here we're just interested in the referral traffic. So what are the other websites of the world that are sending this site traffic? And you can see here again that the court system seems to be generating quite a bit of traffic. Another area that we wanted to really view was a custom dashboard built around campaigns. I'm going to actually get into this. I want to come back to this just because there's a section that will make it make a little more sense. The next area I want to jump into after leaving custom reports is how to share a custom report or a dashboard. So one of the big benefits again is we as an organization don't have to all do the work individually. We can all anyone who really is in the analytics can create some custom reports that can be shared throughout all the law health community. And you can share not only custom reports but you can share the dashboards. And what we mean by share is you're just sharing the setup or the filter systems around the widgets or the custom reports. You're not sharing your local organization's web data. You're sharing a filter system that can be brought into another organization's web data or Google Analytics profile and then it'll display their information but using the same filters. So I'll show that in just a second. But it's important to note too that you can find these custom reports and dashboards not just from your colleagues or from this presentation itself. There are many organizations or websites that provide these. The one is you can do a Google search. So in this case I did a simple Google search for best SEO Google Analytics dashboards. Let's just click on the second result here. And what this is is a blogger who's in the industry who's taken the time to create some custom dashboards. And when you find these sites you can come. So this one is about brand monitoring. So let's say you wanted to monitor the idea of just the Washington Law Health searches. You come here and you hit download dashboard. And what should happen now is it's a direct link to Google Analytics. And what Google Analytics is asking me is what do I want to do with this dashboard. And I would come here and I would identify the let's say the Washington Law Health section. Look it. It creates. And now what I've done is I've taken a dashboard created by a third party that I have no relationship with. But they might be a subject matter expert. And I've imported their filters into my data. So I now have this semi-useful dashboard. And it's a good way to get started. And that's why I bring it up. You can come in here. You can edit these widgets they've already put in to make it work for your system. It's a great way to leapfrog in and get some powerful information without having to do it yourself. Another area of this is the Solutions Gallery. So these are sanctioned dashboards that come from Google. A lot of them do come from third parties. But the idea here is Google is saying we've vetted these organizations. These are clean dashboards. It's a whole community that are just giving you great and useful dashboards to use. So I want to show real quick just how we go about sharing these dashboards ourselves between our colleagues. And this is a pretty simple thing to do. When you're in the dashboarding system, you can come back, you expand your menu. And you're going to find, sorry, that each of these dashboards have an area called share. It's up in the left-hand corner in the dashboards. There's a drop-down. Now the first link is share template link. That's what you want. When you click that, it's just going to give you a URL. And then you can email that URL to your colleague and they can click on it directly and they'll go through the pattern that I just walked you through where they import the directory. But if you're really proud of the dashboard and you want to share with the larger world community, you can hit share in the Solutions Gallery. And what that will do is import that, submit that to the Solutions Gallery, which I just showed you, and give an opportunity for anyone who wants to. So very powerful So at the beginning of the presentation, I said, we talked about conversions, the C of the ABC of Google Analytics. And conversions are really just anything you define as an activity that took place on the site that you were really hoping would take place, or maybe you designed a flow within the site itself to induce this action or this conversion. With the Washington Law Help, we're tracking two events currently. And I believe most of the Law Help sites are doing this as well. The first one is called Downloads. This includes the PDFs and the Word documents called the resources offered by the site. The next one is Links and these are external website links that go into pages or documents. There's a link in the presentation where you can learn more about events. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to just show you a couple areas of the site where you can find some useful information. So in this case, if you go to your traditional reporting menu area and you scroll down on your behaviors, you'll see a section called Events. This is the overview. And it's just that. It's an overview of your event traffic. So you can see how many downloads took place during this time period, how many links. If you click on the downloads and you want to get a better view of what were the downloads that took place, you can go to what's called the Event Label. And that's going to show you the exact PDF. The reason this is useful information is you can find out what actual resources on the site are very useful and very much in demand. I'm not going to say a little bit about the Google URL Builder. The Google URL Builder is a tool, it's a free tool by Google. It essentially allows you to create URLs for tracking purposes. So you'll see here in the first section, under website URL, I put the home page of Washington Health, WashingtonLawHealth.org. Then the second section is called Campaign Source. And I put the Facebook there. The third section is Medium. I put Post. And then I skipped the campaign term because it's not a required field. I've used campaign content because I'm going to link to a section maybe in the divorce, maybe I'm associating with the divorce image in a Facebook post. And then they've chosen to use a blog. But all we're really doing is creating a link that we can track in Google Analytics. So in this case, this link is a link that I would use on Facebook and I would share it with the general public. And when anyone clicks on it, I'm going to get a report in Google Analytics that said the link you put on Facebook at this time or this day generated this much traffic. And the way it does that, see there's a URL string at the bottom of the slide. And the sections in red are all those custom fields that we entered in. Now to the user, they don't really experience this URL. They just click on and go to the page like normal. But Google Analytics pulls the information out of this. Once that happens, it gets sent to this, in our case, a customer report. So this was a customer report we created called Campaign. And you can see how we set up under the dimensions drill down. We have Campaign, Source and Medium, Source and Medium. And what we want to do is we want to monitor the links that we have in our newsletters. So let's take the September newsletter, for example, so far it's generated 151 clicks. So one, it's nice to know that the newsletter is coming from the newsletter and being able to differentiate this ever in the December newsletter. But when you do, if you wanted to do a deeper drill down, if you labeled each of the links using that Google URL builder tool, you could, if you had 10 links, you could have each link to be unique and you could track them. Or you can just use one general URL from the Google URL builder and just say, I just need to know if it came from the newsletter. And then if you wanted to see what content or where were those links going, as a secondary dimension, you can put in landing page. I'm going to give it a little time to catch up. And now what we should see is not just the source, which was the September email blast, but we should also see the URL string that the user was sent to. And that would then in turn tell us which link got clicked on most often and where were the users going. The Google URL tool, and there are ways to automate this that make it very quick to generate these URLs. It's a very powerful tool and can really help you along the way of knowing what marketing campaigns that you're running are effective and which ones aren't. You don't just have to use them in your email blast, you can use them on third-party sites. So if you have a partner site that'll, you know, let's say one of the court systems, you could give them a tracking URL. You could better track the traffic that's coming from them. Just review all this. The next section I want to cover is flow reports. So in Google Analytics, one of the things that I find that everyone wants to be able to do is what do people do when they come to the site, right? So they come to the home page or maybe they land on the family law section. I want to know how they navigate the rest of their, during the rest of their visits. So there are roughly four flow reports. One is a behavior flow report, which we'll go into in a second. Another one is, and the behavior one is really just that. What are the behaviors that that user is engaging in during their time that is in the site? And in our case we would look at maybe events or a particular page visit. User flow is essentially just how does the user, what pages do they go through? They start with one page, what's the second page to go to, what's the third, what's the fourth and where do they exit? Event flows. So if you want to just concentrate on, I want to look at people who ended up downloading this PDF and I want to see their whole pattern before they downloaded it. The flow report is a very powerful report to look at that. And the goal report is essentially the same thing just for goals instead of events. If you download this presentation or get the link for the YouTube version, you'll see there's a video in here that gives you very detailed information on the flow report. One of the things I wanted to show you was the Northwest Justice Project. So on Washington Law Health, one of the big links there is this free legal assistance link. When the users click on this link, they are sent to the Northwest Justice Project. And they're not just sent to the homepage, they're sent to a page with three calls to action. The calls to action are get help, go back to Washington Law Health, call us or apply online. In this case, this is the main conversion we're concerned with. Now here they can learn about how to get help or they can just click this link, apply online. Now in this case, the apply online goes to the third party site, which we don't have tracking code on yet. But we can track how many people are going from Washington to the how to get help to the apply online. So what we have here is a user flow report. I'm going to give it a second to load on your screen. The user report that I'm most interested in is how are people getting from the get legal help to the apply online for help. So here you'll see we roughly had 4,700 sessions to the get legal help page. If I click on that page, I can say I want to just highlight the traffic through here. Now I'm looking at the path that people go to when they're on the get legal help page, where do they go next. So you can see the biggest one is actually the apply online represented by this guy. Now of the 4,700, roughly 800 to 900 people and keep in mind with Google Analytics, the numbers are never 100%. They're estimating using 30 to 70 percent of your traffic unless you're doing a really deep dive, but it's close enough. And what you're seeing is other 4,700 people about 800 or 9, I'm sorry, about 900 people got to the apply online. Well, what if I want to know what they did after that? Well, I can come in, I can say highlight traffic through here and I can see that the rest of their path. But one of the main things that is nice to know is of these 4,700 that started on the get legal help, how many did we lose right away? We lost about half. So half of them when they got to the page just said, I'm not interested. And I left. Now in this case, it might not be bad news. It might be they got to that page and they said, you know what, instead of applying online, I'm going to do the phone call. So once they made the phone call, they no longer needed any of the more of the resources. But the real power in this report is when you customize the flows beforehand. So you map out where do you want these users to go, not just what path or what phone number, but the whole experience. And then you can use this report like this to say, are they fulfilling that experience? And again, there are links in the presentation to do a deeper dive on this. And I think I'm going to hand off the report. Okay, thank you, Josh. So I'm going to talk about three, I'm just going to highlight three findings that I thought were interesting. One of our goals was to discover user stories and get a better picture of how people are getting to and navigating through our site. So we found out that a lot of folks are searching for and viewing resources around seniors issues, such as the state program that provides assistance with in home care called COPE and resources on powers of attorney and estate planning. We also identify partner sites that produce the most interaction with our site. As in visitors from these sites downloading resources or clicking on links and Josh talked about this a little bit earlier. And then lastly, I'm going to show an example of how we identified a potential problem page on our site and how we address fixing it. So the way we discovered that many visitors are looking for information on in home care assistance or the COPE program, as it's called in Washington, was by looking at the key words driving traffic to our site. And in the top 10 of those two of the entries contain the key words COPE. Next slide, please. And so then additionally, we found that seven of our top 10 internal search terms are related to seniors issues. So by looking at the internal search and the key words driving traffic to our site and looking at the high number of views of related senior resources on our site, we're able to see that it's a common user story that people are looking for information on these seniors issues, and particularly that COPE program on Washington Law Health. So why is senior such a hot topic area on Washington Law Health? Well, one of our partner organizations has authored several publications on the COPE program and other Medicaid programs here in Washington. And these publications have become kind of a go to resource on information on these programs. So I was curious so like I searched in Google and if you search for COPE just the term COPE or COPE in Washington, that resource on our site is the number one search result. And so I did a little more digging and I found out that some of our state social services programs and government agencies are handing out those resources to patrons. So it's kind of become the go to resource, our website for information on these programs. So Josh kind of went over this already. But we learned that the top referring sites that produce the most interaction with our site were our state courts website, you know, traffic coming from our own program site, nwjustice.org and almost all of these visitors were interacting with our site somehow. And I won't go over this in too much detail because Josh did but why that is important is because we know we need to be maintaining relationships with these organizations, letting them know of changes to our website or if our links change, we want to be in communication with them to make sure that things get updated on their end. So the last discovery I'm going to talk quickly about is identifying potential problems using your analytics data. And one way to do this is to look at the bounce and exit rates of individual pages on your site. So there are a number of factors that contribute to a high bounce rate. It might not be that there's a problem with the page but it's worth taking a look at. It could just be that users might leave your site from the entrance page if there are site design or usability issues or they might leave after viewing a single page if they found the information they need and had no need or interest in going to other pages. But we took a look at our pages that had both high bounce and exit rates to see if there were any glaring issues that we could try to fix. And so an example of this is we looked at one of our more popular resources which is about employee rights. And it had a fairly high bounce and exit rates up in the high 80 percent range. And when we took a closer look we realized that the resource was just way too long. You can scroll on and on and on before getting to the end. So we decided to break up the resource into smaller individual resources. Next slide. And after we reworked the resource we noticed that the bounce and exit rates reduced down pretty quickly to around the 55 percent range. So it's worth taking a look at these high exit and balance rate pages to see if there are improvements that can be made. Okay. And so that's the end of my part of the presentation. So I'll pass it on to Sam Halper, the law health coordinator at the Mononet. Thanks, Danielle. I just want to take a few minutes to talk about the next stage of this which is going to be taking all of the excellent work that Josh has been doing and enabling Danielle and everybody else who's going to take advantage of this to take it even further by incorporating data that is not not traffic information, not stuff that Google Analytics naturally is aware of but is internal to the law health platform. So this is an example from Washington of what we call a content report. Every law health site administrator is able to download an Excel sheet from the law health back end that gives them a variety of information about all of the resources and organization profiles in their site. And it includes a number of, you know, useful labels like what topic and subtopic channeling category, tag group, the information is associated with. Next slide. Right. So information like that. Some of this, Josh has done a great job of trying to get at with what's already available in Google Analytics. He explained where this top site sections report was coming from and how he uses the URLs that law health produces to figure out which topics and subtopics are getting a lot of attention. By looking at their URLs, there are some limitations to this. Next slide. As Josh mentioned, he's pulling that information out of the URL that are being sent to Analytics. And when you look at a topic page or a subtopic page, you have those labels right in the URL. But by the time a user gets to an actual resource next slide, that information is not there anymore. It doesn't mean that the resource isn't associated with topics and subtopics though. And so once a year right now in our current mechanism, next slide, once a year we provide to our partners what we call a traffic report which associates their content data that is internal to law health, you know, things like the title and the author, channel subtopics, et cetera, with the traffic data coming out of Google Analytics, how many views it gets, how many downloads it gets, that sort of thing. Going forward, there are some limitations to this. Next slide. The way that we're doing this currently, right, I apologize, it's associated with the traffic data. The problem with the way that we're doing this currently is that it's fairly labor-intensive and so we provide these reports to our partners relatively infrequently. And our partners can't create them on demand. And also giving out this information as a spreadsheet gives partners all of the data that they need, but in a fairly static format. It's not as easy to play with it and really get a feel for what these different metrics mean when you stack one against the other. And so going forward, what we hope to be able to do is take the fields next slide. And then that's the animation. Take all of these fields that you see in your traffic reports and make sure that all of this information ends up in Google Analytics so that it can be contrasted next slide against the traffic information that's showing up in Google Analytics already natively. So in Google Analytics in the audience section under custom, you'll notice that there's an area devoted to what are called custom variables. If you click it'll circle. And we're working on the precise strategy that's going to let us deliver all of law help information that's present in the traffic reports and potentially additional fields if we have time and we're able to fit it into the strategy so that any of these can be compared against the kinds of metrics that Josh and Danielle have already found so useful that Google Analytics collects on its own. So that's the next phase of the project. What is organic traffic? So I can answer that. Organic traffic represents all traffic that comes from search engines. So this would be Google, Bing, Yahoo in some cases, AOL in some of the smaller ones. But it's just traffic that comes from search engines that actually isn't paid for. So all the search engines have paid traffic as well. The ad you see on the right-hand side or the top or even in the bottom. But this is unpaid traffic coming from the search engines. So just as a last thought, instead of receiving those traffic reports that I showed, law help partners would have access to all of the data fields that are included in those reports. But in this on-demand dynamic environment that's provided by Google Analytics, this is the plan moving forward. For the 2015 year, partners will likely receive the static traffic report that they're used to. But in 2016, this will be the environment they have. That's their goal. Okay. Thank you, Sam. I guess we could open it up for any questions that people have. This is Liz Keith with Pro Bonnet. And one of the things that was really interesting to me was Danielle and Josh highlighting examples of sites that are referring really high quality traffic, like the court site. And I think we saw the King County Law Library site in that list where users are actively downloading documents and really making good use of the resources on the site. And I was just curious if anybody else, any other attendees have done that analysis and have examples of other really high quality refers that they could share through the chat box or just verbally. I'd love to hear that. And just while we're waiting for anyone that wants to enter anything in, one of the nice things about identifying these sources, and we covered this a little bit, is really what it is, is an opportunity to form a tighter relationship with an organization that has your target audience already attracted. And sometimes it's about tightening that relationship to drive more traffic to your site, but most of the time it's just about getting them more content that they can use to help people that they've already got a relationship with. So maybe it's as simple as making sure that there are pamphlets or forms available at that physical location, or flyers, or maybe it's about forming a relationship and saying, we have a shared audience, obviously, why don't we do a barter and promote each other in our newsletters, or why don't we put together and do a localized webinar for the constituents in our region. Yeah, I've definitely used the referral traffic source in order to identify blogs or other content producers that are working on very similar content. Often if you just reach out to them, since they're already sharing your stuff, they're happy to have a guest blog post or some specialized content that they're able to share with their particular constituency that then links back to your help side or whatever the specialized site is. I mean, it's like a sales lead where they already like you. That's exactly right. And to go back to the original question about what is organic, I see that they were also asking what are non-organic traffic sources. So non-organic traffic sources would include direct traffic. So these are people that type your URL in directly, or they might be clicking on links somewhere that we can't attribute source information to. There's referral traffic, which are all the traffic coming from these third party sites, and then there's paid traffic. And then the last one is usually campaign traffic, which is traditionally traffic coming from email blasts. It can also be coming from any source that you label. Great. If you have a donor management system or an email system that is tracking those things also, you can often easily identify those sources through the external system and see how well those are working. We've got a few questions here. One of them is we have a page that consistently gets much higher page views than others. How can I figure out how people are getting to that specific page? So in that case, what I would do is I would recommend using a customer report. And let me just pause, I'll build one live for you. So you can come in and you can say, in this case, let's say source. So source will give us the information of who sent you the traffic. And then under the metric, we'll just say users, which will represent the number of users that are sent by that source. And you can add a filter. And the filter is really where you're going to identify the individual page. So here I'm looking for the filter that's just labeled page. And to make this dead on simple, I'm just going to put a slash here which should represent the home page. So when I hit save, what should show me is all the sources traffic for just the home page. So it's a very easy report to generate. And it's one that if you googled it, you could probably find step by step instructions. But if you provide your email address at the end of this in the chat, I'd be happy to build this customer report to you and send you the URL so that you could import it into your existing Google Analytics system. Can I ask a follow up, Josh? Yep. So what if it's a resource that where there's a link on my home page, but then there's also a link to it in a couple of other places. Let's say I have a mini portal with a link to it as well, and it appears in the list of resources for a particular subtopic. And I want to know how many people are getting there from the mini portal versus the home page versus the subtopic. So multiple sources internal to my site. So there are a couple for the advanced users. What I would recommend is going back to that the behavior flow report and mapping, highlighting the traffic from the final page that you're interested in. But for people who maybe aren't as advanced and don't want to use the behavioral flow, what you could do is you could track, you could create a custom URL using Google URL Builder and you could then use the custom URL for each of those links on the different parts of your site. But probably the easiest way if we go back into the traditional reporting section and we come under behavior and then site content all pages. Let's say the report you're interested in is this page I just clicked on which is your rights of the tenant in Washington. There's tabs here in the upper left hand corner of all these pages and one is called navigation summary. And what that does is it helps you map out the path to that page. And it shows you the previous page as well as the next page the user went to when engaging with a particular page. Can I answer your question? Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. Great. Any other questions? I noticed in that chat box that Tim said that Law Help California is getting some referrals from the state bar and the California Department of Consumer Affairs. And it might be interesting for folks interested in this sort of question about what's a high quality referer to just continue to exchange that information through the Law Help list or we can help you get to it in your Google Analytics reports if you're not sure where to find it. But that might help just statewide websites identify new potential outreach opportunities or outreach partnership channels that they could be pursuing. Yeah, it definitely sounds like a useful email thread to try to get the different websites to discuss what their top four or five different referrals are. Because if a different state is not getting referrals from the source that may be a potential source to reach out to. Yeah. That's a very good point. And just from, I have a pretty big background in search and change optimization as well. And when you reach out to these recent referrals or organizations that are already linking to you, one of the things to keep in mind is those links are some of the most powerful links that you get that will improve your organic rankings with Google. So Google looks at the sites that link to you, that link to your website and rewards you with really high rankings for relevant terms when you have strong links from strong institutional sites like courts and nonprofits. So when you do reach out to these organizations you can ask them to not just link to you using an image but link to you using a text link that has what we call anchor text and anchor text are the words that are used in the link. You could have them link saying free legal advice in Washington and then link those words to your website and that will help you rank for just that term. And so if you- No, that is a great tip. A common mistake is people using click here or something else with the text having it be the terms people are going to search for is going to increase your traffic significantly on those terms. And another thing I want to call attention to sort of pulling out of the last comment is that Josh has done a tremendous job giving us a set of tools that we can use to start to explore this universe but this environment is extremely fluid. He's shown how easy it is to pinker with the settings of these widgets and to share the results of that tinkering with the broader community. And in Danielle's portion she already sort of highlighted for everybody oh we've learned that high exit rates combined with high bounce rates are a decent indicator of pages that need attention but all of these metrics are sort of indirect ways of getting at the issues that we actually care about underlying it which what values correspond to a high quality referral what values correspond to a page that's having trouble and we'll get the most out of this if this is the start of an ongoing conversation where we can share the insights that we learn as we start to use this tool with one another. Thank you guys for coming out.