 Thanks, guys. So I always preface this. I'm not a public speaker. I tend to get nervous and talk really fast. So feel free to ask questions, slow me down. So a little bit about me. I've been using WordPress on and off since 2004. I needed a personal blog, and it was much easier to use WordPress than to roll my own, which I tend to like to do. I'm a DIY guy. Sort of a career chameleon. I used WordPress because my first professional job, it was a WordPress shop, so I learned WordPress. Then I did Jumla for a while because the next job I had, they were a Jumla shop. So I kind of just learned the environment I'm in. And now I'm currently a corporate digital analyst. I still use WordPress a little bit for microsites for marketing. But really, this talk could be more towards the analytics side of it, but I do have some plugins to show. To relate it back to WordPress. And I still write code every once in a while. I'm actually a little rattled because I just did a 48-hour hackathon that we just got done with. So if I'm stuttering and a little tired, I apologize. So overview. Things have really changed since the 90s. That's when I really started with the web on things that we track and can track. Do you guys remember all these? The, right, I may or may not have had those on my website. It was a big thing, right? One hit counters were on every site, and it was a bragging right. We got 10 million hits. We got 1,000 hits. Whatever it was, you wanted the world to know how popular you were. And really, pageviews don't cut it anymore. Who cares? You could have 11 billion hits. But if no one bought your product, no one signed it for your newsletter, if nobody did anything with your website, then who cares how many people went to it and then immediately left? That number really doesn't mean anything. It's like McDonald's old campaign of, you know, 11 billion burgers sold. We get it. You make burgers, and a lot of people have eaten them. But what are you doing right now? So we'll talk today about ROI, which are an investment, setting up goals, tracking your campaigns, and the sources of that traffic. Because even if you only have 10 people visit your website, if those 10 people spend a million dollars, then who cares that you only had 10? In my description of the talk, I talked about Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Does anybody use Adobe Analytics? Really are. All right. Good, good, good. I noticed it's more in the corporate world. Google's free. Adobe's not. So that tends to be. I just wanted to know my audience before I went into too many examples. Is there anyone out here running paid campaigns? Google AdWords, Facebook? OK, good. I'm going to start with just some definitions of terms that I've seen in the corporate world. People get wrong all the time. And it leads to conflict and really trust issues. That's why I run into a lot of someone has access to the platform. They run RUM report. Someone else runs another report. The numbers don't match. And now people are like, well, he's wrong. He's wrong. And that leads to a lot of confusion. So first up is Pageview. And that's what we started with. Those hit counters were. It's literally when the page loads, it's a hit. And it's a page view. Time is not a factor. If you hit refresh, that's a page hit. If you leave the page and immediately come back to it, that's another page hit. There's no timeframe involved. If you go to the page, it's a hit or a page view. But page load time is a factor. And this will come into any of your paid efforts. So if you click on an ad that leads to a page, and they're like, oh, I didn't mean to click on that. And they go back, or they close the browser, then that's not a page hit. The page didn't load, or it didn't get to the analytics code to fire. And it's not a page hit. I've got a story about that here in a little bit. Visit, it's a hit by a page by a single user within a given timeframe. Most platforms Google and Adobe, that timeframe is defaulted to 30 minutes. But you can set it to whatever you like. It ignores the page refresh. It ignores the back and forth. It's one per session. So if I visit your website, I browse 10 pages, and then go back to where I started. That first page is still only going to have one visit from you during that time period. And then unique visitor, exactly what it sounds like. It's the individual user. It is dependent on a timeframe. And it's one hit per user per timeframe. I know that sounds confusing, but you become a unique visitor during that session. You can have multiple sessions. But after the timeframe, after that 30 minute period, now you're unique again. For example, if you ran a site stat report for the month of January, and you had so many unique visitors, and then you compared it to the same report in February, those users can be in both reports because it was separate timeframes. They're unique to the timeframe. Now if you ran a quarterly report, that same user is only counted once. So they can get misleading when you're doing quarterly versus monthly reports. The numbers can change. So a quick example of those three terms is go to a web page. Standard hit one page, like I clicked an ad or something. It's one page view and one visit from one unique user. If I go to that same page twice within a 30 minute window, it's two page views. Your hit counter, your neon green thing on your website will count as two. But you're still just one visit, and you're still just one person. Now if you go to the same page the next day, it will now be a third view, a second visit, because you're outside that 30 minute window. But you're still a unique visitor if it's within the monthly report. Yeah, yeah. Oh, let me see if I can change that on a flyer. No, no, no, that's fine. I'll probably have to do it per slide, right? Unless someone, is that? Well, I mean, well, yeah, just shout out or hopefully I can, my words will, but a quick story on that, the page view is working with a marketing client who was doing paid advertising. And the results weren't that good, to be honest. They spent a lot of money to drive traffic, and traffic wasn't working. So they ran reports. You can see in your ad platform to see how many times an ad was clicked. And they were trying to compare that to visits. So for starters, that's wrong, because visits doesn't count their BPs. So I'm sure you've all had it where on a Spotify, you accidentally click on a ad if you have the free version. And that little x is hard to hit, so you end up hitting the ad. You go to the web page. It happens. Release happens to me. So this is first person experience. So you try to close it. You accidentally click the ad instead. You go to the web page. But before the web page loads, you're like, I didn't mean to click that. So you go back. So it didn't count as a page view visit. It didn't count at all. But when I go back, I'm still trying to close that x, so I hit it again. And then I go back to the web page again. So when you're comparing ad clicks to visits, if I let the page load, it still would be one visit, but it was two ad clicks. So when they're comparing these metrics of how well the paid advertising was doing to a visit, it's not one to one. So the numbers are going to be off anyway. This vendor is trying to say that we had our analytics set up wrong because the numbers weren't matching. So for one, you've got to make sure you're talking apples to apples. Ad clicks usually is two page views, because it's one to one. If I click to add multiple times, I want multiple visits to reflect that. Then on top of that was page load time. They hadn't considered that. So that example I said, I clicked on the ad because I missed the x. Page never fully loaded. The Google Analytics code, Adobe code, never fired. I never got credit for that hit, but the ad got credit. I had to pay for that ad click so the numbers don't match. So really, if you're trying to work on return on investment of ad campaign spend, using that comparison is not going to work because it's not going to be one to one. And this is just an example of a Google Analytics dashboard to show you the visits versus page views and where it matters on what you're reporting on. Most of the time, from my experience, page views is going to be misleading. It's going to be a lot higher. It's probably what you want to report on. It's what your bosses want to see. We got a million hits this month. But it might not actually mean much because that million hits could have been the guy running the report hitting refresh a billion times because he wanted to boost the numbers for his boss. It happens. People inflate numbers all the time. Especially in the corporate world, if you're trying to get budget dollars, you want to prove that your area of the website or your marketing effort did well. So you might try to upsell how big your numbers are. And really, the visits are what you care about because that's closer to a single person. So now we'll talk a little bit about goals. A goal would be what do you want someone to do on your website? That's great that you got those visits, those page views. But did you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Did you want them to put things in their cart? Did you want them to actually purchase something? Is it just content and you're hoping for ad impressions? What is it that your website does and how do we measure that? So you want to track those things. I know my description of the talk is I track all the things. That's not always necessarily true. You want to track the things that matter so you don't waste your time. The newsletter sign up is something that matters to you then that's what you should have some specific tracking on, contact forms, form submissions in general, which could be like support ticket or help or it could be with the e-commerce checkouts or it could just be putting things in the cart like abandonment rates. Put something in the cart and check out. I want to know what those are. And of course downloads if you're, that's important to you. If you have white papers or a product, MP3s or your podcasts, you want to know what the downloads are. And Google Analytics is how you would set that up. So you guys can see this. There's multiple types. So there's a destination, which I like, which would be like a thank you page. So you have a contact form. Generally those are the form itself. You fill it out, you pass the validation and you'll go to a thank you for submitting your form. We'll get back to you soon or thank you for your request. Whatever it may be, but there is a specific URL that is the response to submitting the form. And you can set up a goal to read the traffic from that page. Or you can do depending on what you're trying to track, a duration. You might, for like ad impressions or a blog, you might say, my goal is to have them on the site for five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour. Whatever it may be. This one's interesting. It doesn't immediately sound like something that would be useful. Pages per session. But think of that more of a customer journey. For example, an online quote. I work with auto quotes. It's a multi-step process. I need to know your accident history. I need to know make a model. I need to know driver's license info, personal info. It could be five or six steps. So your goal could be I want to track their journey through that step. I could create separate goals for each sort of bucket of that step and then see where people are falling off as they go through. But if I just had the end result of getting a quote, that won't tell the whole story. But that might be all that you care about. So you need to figure out what your goals are before you put a plan in place. And then another straightforward one is an event. You can set event code to say on a button click, like check out. I click check out. I can track that as my goal. How many checkouts did I get? How many downloads did I get when I click the download button? Campaign tracking. So this would be when you run a paid search or paid campaign of any kind. It could be on Facebook, Instagram, traditional paid search with Google ads. Generally, you're gonna want to know what's working so you need to track those. And those platforms generally give you some sort of a campaign ID, a CID, a tracking code of some sort. And we can track those. We'll talk about this first. So when you track those, there's two things you're looking for, attribution and ROI. ROI meaning simply a return on investment. You spent some money on ads. What did you get for it? Hopefully you got more than you put in. So you spent a thousand bucks. Hopefully you made a thousand bucks or the equivalent. It's not always about money. And attribution is what is the distribution of that spend to the marketing efforts? So you can look at the traffic that went to your website and say, was it Facebook that did the heavy lifting? Was it Google ads that did the heavy lifting? Was it just organic search? Do we have good SEO and keywords? And maybe we can roll back our spending because our natural campaigns are working just as good. And then you're gonna want to look to optimize those. So once you have your attribution and ROI in place, we'll show an example of how you can check that, then want to start optimizing. So if Facebook was doing better than Google, then maybe shift your advertising dollars. We're gonna, this next month, we're gonna put more money into Facebook than Google and see how it goes. Continuously checking, continuously optimizing. Then even within, say Google ads, you've got an multiple ads where the AB testing comes in where you have dogs versus cats. You got an ad with a cat in it, ad with a dog in it, and then you just check which one drove more traffic. Of course, bad example, it would be the cats. So here's an example inside Google Analytics. This is your dashboard. Outside of WordPress, this is straight in Google's website. And we've got channels here. So you can see, this is my personal website. I don't have any paid action going on right now. So there's just direct and organic. Direct being people typed in my christened.net, they typed it in directly. Organic is they used a search engine of some sort, but I didn't pay them to do that. They didn't click on an ad. They clicked on me from a search result. And then referral is from some other website. So possibly the Workamp Peoria's website that had a link, that's where a couple of those could have came from. But you can use this then to track where that traffic's coming from and start optimizing them. If your organic is at the top, then keep up with your SEO, maybe roll back and save some money on your advertising dollars. And I will show an Adobe version. So in Adobe, a little bit different interface. So just a little bit different view of breakdown of channels that are working. So we had some Hulu ads, just a regular blog which would be organic. Instagram, you can see here we have different marketing campaigns going on and we can at a glance see which one's doing better. TDD, just so you guys know it's a big display platform so you can go to them and say I've got this ad and they will find websites to display it. But you guys are more likely doing possibly YouTube, Facebook, the big social ones. And you can quickly just see visits versus unique visitors. And what this will tell you is how many people are coming back, how many multiple ad clicks are you getting from the same person? And that could be interesting to know in advertising we talk about how many touches does it take. So I might have to show the same person, five ads, seven ads, 10 ads before I get them to buy. And the difference between unique visitors and visits will start to tell you that picture. So you can get an average of how much I need to advertise to someone to get them into the funnel. All right, so how do you get this, how do you get analytics running? So is anyone not using analytics at all? I'm not checking it. No, that's fine. So for most of you this will probably be a review but there's plugins that do it for you. Here's a couple of my favorites. I'm currently using this middle one, just Google Analytics by Share This. It is very basic and it literally just puts your Google tracking code where it needs to go. There's no bells and whistles. It just gets your code on the site so you don't have to. This top one that I'm going to start, I'm gonna be switching to, allows you to do a lot of that, the goal setting and campaign tracking from within the plugin. So you don't have to do that yourself because I can kind of be that form I showed with the, whether it's a duration, whether it's a destination that can get kind of confusing and this plugin, highly rated plugin, will help you with that. I've tested that a little bit but I haven't implemented it. But again, it's WordPress and it's a plugin. You click it, you install it, you put in your Google ID and you're good to go. And this one down here is specifically for events which might be good for your goal tracking if you have downloads on the page or you have one button goals. Clicking for a sign up, contact form, something where it's not a multi-step process, it's a single event as your goal. For Adobe, I'm glad not many of you use it in here, you're kind of on your own. There is, I saw my check, there was a single WordPress plugin for Adobe and it hadn't touched them like five years. So you're kind of on your own. Similar setup of just adding your tracking code. You can do it without a plugin, don't use a plugin. The problem with not using a plugin is switching themes. If you're never ever going to switch a theme and it's never going to be updated, okay, put your own code in there. But that's not gonna happen. It's hard to maintain, switch between themes, especially if you're an organization that has multiple people, you're not a one man shop. Somebody can make a change to that theme without telling you. And then I see, you know, your tracking goes away and you have no idea why. But if you were going to do it yourself, you'd edit within the theme and the theme's header and you'd put it right below the opening body tag. So there's an example of blurred out, but there's Google tracking code. It's a snippet you get from inside the tool and you just drop it in in the body tag. But again, the problem with this is that's in a theme in your website using WordPress's editor, which is one, it's dangerous to use that editor. It's easy to mess something up. And if you ever change themes, that code goes with it. Updates of the theme maker makes a change to that header file and it gets overwritten, the tracking's gone again. So it's much easier to use one of the highly rated simple WordPress Google plugins. Yeah, yeah. What's that? It's fine, I tend to go the free route. Like they have the pro version. Their free version is just as good as any of the others. It's essentially you put the tag in and it gives you the basic tracking. The pro version, it looks real slick, but it depends on how much money you wanna spend. I've not used the pro version, I've not opted to pay for it, but it looks like it would be just fine. Now, just in general with paying for plugins that give you the added functionality, I only stay away from that because you can get all that data from the platform itself. You could log into Google Analytics on Google's website and see all those dashboards and numbers and it's convenient to see them inside your WordPress dashboard, but is that convenience worth the price of a premium plugin? In my opinion, it's not, but that's me personally. For us? Nope, that's just what I personally have experience with. Quick bonus topic, the Chrome extension. So you wanna check if your code worked. There is a Chrome extension officially by Google, so it's legit, you don't have to worry about it, called Tag Assist, literally even by Google. Let's go to the Google Chrome web store, look for it, install it, and it looks like this. So it will, you'll have a little icon, I guess my screenshot isn't very good, but there'll be an icon you click like all the Chrome extensions and it drops down this assistant tool that will look at the page. I probably should have blurred that out, but it will show you that your tag is there and give you green, red, it'll tell you if it's working right, in my case, it was a single page, page view request was hit, you can drop down where to optimize, if it was red, it would give you suggestions on what you might have done wrong. There's a typo in it, code doesn't complete, code didn't fire, it will tell you what to do to go about fixing it. That's all I have for today. There's my contact info, I highlighted the R in my name because there's another Matthew without the R, Christians at gmail.com, who I've actually talked to because he gets my emails sometimes. And I don't know how he figured out it was me, I must have had it in a footer or somebody put it, the email in the footer, I don't know, he somehow figured out that the emails he was getting were meant for me. So I like to highlight that because it is, it is confusing. And Twitter and Instagram, and feel free to contact me, I'm a data nerd, I love this stuff, so feel free to contact me with any questions. Yeah, go ahead, oops. I forgot, there was one of its tags that you had to, but then when I put it in there, and I used the flipping for that, it was conflicting with the Yoast phone because Yoast has their own analytics in there to show certain effects to. Yeah, if you're using Yoast, yeah, that definitely. One way that we know her, should I just use Google or should I just use Yoast? I would use Yoast only because you probably have Yoast on your site for a reason, so you're doing other things with it. So yeah, I would keep them bundled and you don't want too many plugins anyway, you don't want that bloat, so since Yoast can do it, just I would stick with Yoast because you'll get the SEO benefit. All right, thanks guys.