 Okay, I think we can go ahead and get started hi everyone welcome to the webinar on content performance dashboarding. I'm Adam good I'm a senior strategist here at person CKO and I'm joined by my colleague Rick Richards who is an analyst at person CKO. I'm going to be handy enough to him about midway through the presentation to really dive deep into a dashboard dashboard that you can use to evaluate your content. As we're going through the webinar couple housekeeping points microphones have been muted cameras have been turned off. We'll post questions in the chat, and we'll review them during q amp a segment, and we'll be keeping an eye on chat as well if it seems like some of the we can dive into and address directly while we're talking. The next point is that the webinar is being recorded. We'll distribute this after the session, as well as this deck, particularly the front section. So there's some sort of high level points about data strategy and KPI approaches to KPIs that we won't spend a ton of time on, but has some good resources in there for you afterwards. You want to go to the next slide. What about person CKO if you're not familiar with us. We help teams accomplish more with their audiences that takes a wide variety of forms but at heart it's consulting and helping organizations figure out what they need to do to engage with their audiences more effectively. Oftentimes that looks at road mapping so where organizations are with their communications and engagement capabilities and where they need to go. So that includes looking at the technical platforms that make up your engagement architecture and advising how you can improve, enhance, replace, etc, all the things with your, your platforms. And we also focus recognize in particular on data strategy. So how can you understand your audiences more understanding behavior and better leverage that data to increase your effectiveness with your audiences. Next slide. And this is a cool little graphic that talks about how we see possibilities. We have our philosophy of engagement architecture, which really values looking holistically at the people processes and platforms that connect and work well together to help you deliver experiences to your audiences and to engage with them, all aligned around a core strategy. So the, the webinar today will be a little bit about data strategy and then how you can get your people together around processes and platforms to better look at content performance for your websites. So whenever we're talking about, you know, platform or a process or someone in your organization, we think of those three is kind of like a tripod that really helps drive your engagement efforts. Next. I'll give you a little couple minutes about data strategy. Before we dive into the, to the dashboard. The reason that these words are in two different colors, big and bold is that to emphasize different aspects of data strategy so if you're not using your data strategically it's just data. It's a strategy that does not have data. Well, it's not as effective as it could be. So, whenever we look at data or analytics we think about data strategy so what do you want to do with your audiences and how can you get data that will help you do that. So here the next slide, we kind of think of sort of four requirements or four elements of data strategy work. And, you know, without, you know, if anyone of these four is missing or is underperforming your data strategy isn't isn't complete or something to be doing as much for you as you would like. So the first element is strategy definition which is really what are you trying to do, what are you trying to accomplish that you can use data to to improve. So, two is tracking so once you know what you want to accomplish you need to figure out how you can track all that information and interaction. Three is reporting so how do you report effectively on those strategic metrics that you identified and set up to track on your various systems. So, how is it received how is that report used, and that leads to adoption and optimization. So really creating a culture of data within your organization. So data that isn't tracked doesn't exist David isn't reported on, or adopted or used might as well worth tracking in the first place. And that's what a big focus of today's webinar is around the reporting piece, particularly when it comes to content performance on your website. And go to the next slide. Before we jump because I'll come back to this in a little bit but you know if any red flags are going up for you here that that's probably good because we're talking about data strategy and not just analytics when when people say oh we're doing analytics well or we're really focused on analytics. They tend to be talking about number two and number three. And that's all well and good but if you don't have the strategy definition. You're not going to have metrics that matter necessarily maybe you'll accidentally get some we'll look at that a little bit later but and that adoption and optimization piece. You can have the best tracking setup you can have all kinds of customizations, you can have really elaborate reports, but if your organization doesn't trust the data and doesn't act on the data. Then ultimately, it's, it's kind of a waste of time and the data can languish and then can answer questions wrongly later down the road when someone else finds it when it's not being actively maintained. Yeah, another point I'll make here is that when we talk about analytics or data strategy we're talking holistically about all the different sources of data that your organization has access to not just website analytics we will be focusing specifically on content performance of your website today. But there are many, many sources of data that are really valuable from your CRM to your email system to your fundraising databases whatever the case may be. There's hopefully data there that that you can and should leverage in a strategic framework. So we'll be focusing again on the website piece of things today but know that it is all connected and it's becomes more valuable the more that you can understand all those different sources of data. I'll leave this up there just to talk about, you know the different roles that analytics can play in your organization, really thinking about that adoption and optimization piece that Rick mentioned because if you're, if you're collecting all this information but you're not doing anything with it, then you're really not. You're not, you're not, you're not doing anything with it you're not getting the value out of out of that data or that activity so here's some different roles that analytics can play in your organization so one of them is storytelling. So this is really about understanding your audiences and demonstrating impact with good data about engagement and it can help you figure out what types of stories you should be telling to audiences at times. Myth Buster is always a favorite one so if there are hot debates about whether certain tactics work better than other than others. So analytics and data is a place to sort of bring a neutral third party of data to the table. Speaking of table coffee table. The idea is that these should be conversations. Your metrics and your reporting should generate good conversations that will inspire your teams to, to improve their efforts and share what they've learned. Not just here's the number great. Next month I'll show you another number. It's all about having the conversation and what those kinds of kinds, what those kinds of conversations can enable an air traffic control data can really play a valuable, valuable role in helping you with targeting and automation. It can help you identify from from this vast audience or audiences that you have, what are the appropriate segments that you need to be engaging with, what tactics are working with specific segments. So it really gives you a more fine tuned sense of who you're engaging with. I don't want to, we have these four here but I just want to speak to the power of convening you know we talked a little about the coffee table but really all of these are ways to convene with the data organization, build that organizational trust and start really becoming a data champion The end goal there the epic level is when you're just implicitly trusted I think there's a lot of folks who have had the experience of I see this in the data or I ran this report and I believe this is true. People don't believe you other teams say that that doesn't match my numbers I know this I know this stuff really well, or the executive teams will not will say well this contradicts things we've looked at before or this isn't, you know, in the job description of where we want to head we keep that data in a different system etc. So it's more that you can convene teams and build that consensus around around items and around understanding them, the greater your trust your organizational trust in the data grows, and the easier it is to do these things and the the one story I always like to tell is SMITI, which we have a nice case study of on our website where one organization found the metrics that they were always they always wanted to pull these before a meeting different people didn't have time etc. We helped them build that automated tool and they actually was named the social media intelligence tool and then they renamed it SMITI, because they, they realized they had to invite SMITI to all of a certain type of meeting. So the dashboard became an attendee and a critical attendee who brought the data that that made the meeting possible every time so. Yeah, don't, don't sleep on convening powers with your data. Yeah, absolutely. And I think another critical piece there is, you know, who's going to be seeing the report and why, in what context, what do you want them to do with it, and what kind of conversation you want to have. Okay, so the next section, we're just going to talk high level about metrics and KPIs, sort of some philosophical underpinnings for how do you identify. How should you look for metrics how she you should understand metrics, knowing that in a few minutes will will switch very specifically to to website metrics and content performance metrics. So I would like to stress some of the sort of philosophical underpinnings of our approach to, to metrics and KPIs. So a couple key sort of weird cheesy acronyms that I like to come up with so why we use KPIs cap me cap me. Remember the phrase cap me. These will show you what's what's valuable about KPIs so curation. So they help you focus on data that matters. That's the C. There's not much data your fingertips, particularly you have Google Analytics sort of set up out of box there's way more data than you need, or that you can that you need to focus on that you need to think about curation helps you really focus on the data that matters for action. So good KPI will help you understand what you should do next, if the KPI is met or isn't met, and how you should use your time prioritization. So what what metrics do you prioritize or an expression of your values what do you care about what what you're focusing on now management so good KPI will help you set and communicate clear expectations, so that you don't have someone coming out of the blue saying how many sites visits did we get right you are saying, what we care about is engaged audiences around this piece of content, and you're saying the expectation that this is what we're going to look at this is why it matters. And then finally obviously evaluate, you know good metric will help you understand and demonstrate success. Another way of thinking about this we go to the next slide is obligatory always be closing reference, always be asking why. So whenever you're talking about what kinds of metrics you should be looking at, you need to you need to ask why a lot. You know why do you want to know how many visitors your site gets. It doesn't matter what channel they're coming from, why are you reporting on bounce rate. So why is really what takes a metric, what's just a number and sort of elevates it to an actionable insight, or to your to your strategy. And if you can't get a satisfactory why is it worth your time to track it and report on it and look at it. You know you don't want to just be looking at numbers for numbers sake. You know we're not, we're not abstract pure mathematicians, I mean maybe some of us are I don't know all of our backgrounds but I'm assuming that that we are not pure abstract mathematicians that just want to look at numbers. We want to look at them for specific reasons. So the next slide. Another way of thinking about the metrics that you choose is they tell a story. If they're, they're meaningful. They have an impact. So on the right is what we're going for. They connect outreach chow comes. So, you know, what did you do and what happened because of it. They're hard to move so you can't say hey we want more people to like us. We want, we want a higher brand sentiment. We have we want a specific metric that we can't sort of just switch around. They're clear signs of what you should do again if you're hitting it or not hitting a particular KPI, you should have a plan in place to look into why that is, and what you can learn from. This is something built for your, for your organization so we'll talk about some kind of sort of direct standard out of the box metrics that you can use with content performance, but those are going to become more powerful the more you can tailor them to your organization. And this is opposed to vanity metrics, you know, site visitors email sign ups things that are just, you know, look big and impressive they're easier to get. They actually connect your mission right I assume that, you know, most people on this call or not do not have a site that is monetized based on people just getting on the site so you're not monetizing page views. You are probably hoping that people donate or that people will take an advocacy action. So, you were trying to get to impact metrics that tell this the story of the impact of your work. All right, if you go to the next slide. And you've probably heard of the smart metric, you know, is your KPI specific measurable attainable relevant and time bound. I won't spend a lot of time on this. I won't spend a lot more time with this later but it's fairly well known framework, you know, you really need a KPI that is specific that you can measure that you think you can achieve that it's relevant to what you're doing now and that it's that's time bound that you know you can focus on it for a particular period of time. And then people will help organizations think about what sort of quarterly reporting they want to do. And there are some metrics that they might want to report on every single single quarter, but there are many metrics that aren't relevant for three quarters of the year maybe they're relevant for a specific point in time. So you always want to think about, you know, what your organization or what your teams priorities are as your, as you're thinking of your metrics. Next. So let's KPI is generally again the focus of this webinar is going to be on content performance on your website. Why do we tend to focus on website well it's one of the places where you know most of your outreach has in common, you're directing people to your website people are discovering your website. And for most organizations, your deepest content is published and kept where people come and have the deepest and sort of most sensitive areas of engagement. And then you know it's where people are looking just to find, you know, find out about you to find out who you are what you're up to, you know, does your mission match their values. So you have a lot of things that come into your website from email, social media mentions etc. And if you look carefully at your website. That can tell you a lot about types of people who are coming to you and what they care about. The next slide. And we'll get into more aspects of this but with the dashboard but really what we mean when we talk about engagement or engagement architecture is, what are people actually doing when they when they come to the website. We also see reports on page views and how many people come to the site, people with pages people land on, but we like to get deeper into, you know, what are people actually doing on the page. And many times that can be a call to action, such as donate or take an advocacy action or sign up for email, but a lot of times for content, there's a lot of specific, specific micro interactions that can be tracked. So we can see how engaging the content is, you know, are your audiences playing that video, or how much of that video are they watching that your team spent a month to produce. Are they clicking through and viewing the images in a nice image gallery that you've created. You know, measuring with, you know, interacting with data features if you've developed, you know, an interactive infographic. And most importantly, are they going down and reading more content are they actually getting to the end of the page. So we like to get as sort of specific and focused on what engagement means what types of interactions, you know, comprising engagement. And that's what we'll be starting to dig into here. Next slide. Yeah, just to just to say real quick, you know, a lot of what's what's basic from say something like go analytics are just going to be like page use or time on page. And we'll look at those, they are useful, if that's if that's all you have. But there's a wealth of information on on your site, that's going to be more relevant. So even just some some basic, you know, clicking a read more button, let you know how engaged people are how long to take them to click the read more button. So you can start thinking through about your organization's content and really think of, you know, what what do we want people to do when they're on the website. What, what do we care most about what what counts as consumption to us and it's probably not just a page view or just time on page because that can mean anything from I got up and walked away. It was up on my screen for 20 minutes. Or I, you know, this is actually something that's meant to be read in 30 seconds and why are people spending 10 minutes on the page could actually be a bad sign so all of these things are worth looking at kind of in tandem and holistically with that strategy. Yeah, absolutely and that that that holistic pieces is really important and that's where getting into more context about about what you are actually trying to track, and what you care about is really important. So instead of just saying hey we got 12,000 page views. What types of pages were viewed, what types of content review. So maybe that content about so maybe that content was about reopening in COVID so now you know, hey, lots of people came to a page about about reopening they downloaded the toolkit they took an action. Those are things that are going to be unique to your organization, and the more that you can define those and set up your systems to track those, the better able you're going to be to actually dig in and get more meaningful granular data. And then, hey, all of our content about reopening versus booster shots that performed a lot better so we can, we can learn from that we can sort of elevate our messaging about reopening. Or if our booster shot campaign is not getting as much content we can look at why what we might need to do to improve it. So that context is absolutely critical. Okay, so. Yes, we get you jumped to the next slide. This is, this is just to show you again that the, the wealth of data that you have is not just around your website there are a lot of different sources of data. Again we'll be focusing more specifically on the website and content performance today, but you think of kind of three of the big channels that feed into your website social, your email or ads. We're thinking about that data and data points around those channels as well, and particularly how they drive behavior to your website. So as much as possible you want to be thinking about the holistic audience journey, you know from where they heard about you to how they found you to what they did and how they continue to engage pieces of that story are going to be in different platforms. You know different platforms have different skill sets in terms of what they can know about your audience. We'll be focusing today on the website, you know particularly thinking about audience reach and engagement, and then subset of content so the more that you can layer in that context what type of content what topics what regions, what actions people take the more, you know the more valuable that data is going to be. Well some of this background layer I don't want to speak too much about the different the other data sources, unless Rick you want to mention anything about that. Yeah, the only the only thing I'll notice is from a feasibility standpoint, what you see on the left here and the little clicker thing. I don't see it on the zoom menu anymore but the social email ads website are all fairly easy to automate and start reporting on, which is, you know, another great reason like we can we can look at the stuff and targeting immediate data on that. When you get into search tools for keyword and trend analysis, media monitoring, actually in person events not just like on website events, and video and podcast data. It doesn't so many different systems and it doesn't always integrate easily, or sometimes at all. So it can be hard to layer, layer that that data in, but sometimes it's also fairly easy, you know, for an example that will might might look at later. I can see search traffic in Google Analytics, I can see who's coming from organic search, I can then go to search console Google search console, and see what people were searching for that brought them to the site and what landing page they put up on. It's not directly correlated but I can start to, you know, tell that story and put those put those pieces together. And then you get into surveys research internal data all the way on the right here. That's, that's even more kind of custom and harder to bring in so just kind of right sides your expectations for what we'll get into in a second here which is, think about the story you want to tell think about who you're telling the story to, and then think about the scope of data that that you have access to in the, and the regularity you want to tell that story. I guess that's, I just keep myself up so. Yeah, the bringing this part back up to say again you know number two and number three is is analytics that's what people are talking about but the, when they say analytics, but in terms of data strategy, you need to make remember one that the strategy definition is informing that tracking, and is informing that reporting, because if the metrics that you're tracking don't correlate to the KPIs in your organization. As Adam said it's, you know, even if you have smart goals at the organizational level, if you're not tracking against them and you're tracking something else or something kind of tangentially related. It's going to break down that trustworthiness of the data in your organization, and people are going to aren't going to rely on it. The same thing with reporting. People are going to want to see that you're reporting in a way that sounds the same, you know, an example that we talked about a lot is adding your context to something like Google Analytics. Content groups are adding content types into Google Analytics so that you can actually it can view the data in the same way that you organizationally would view your content. If that makes sense. And if you're if they're reporting it can kind of mirror the strategy definition that's going to make adoption and optimization a lot easier because then people are going to say, I have these goals. I've been tasked with doing these things. And now I have a report that tells me exactly how I'm doing against those goals. I can use this. I can. Oh, these, these types of content, content with these topic tags convert best for my goals. So if I want to improve the goals that have been tasked with organizationally. I can look at that number and I can watch it move and I can push content that should drive more of those things. So always start with a reporting charter when you're when you're building a report and we're having a bit of a cooking show moment where we kind of tell you how we're doing all this and then bend down and say and here's what the finished product looks like. So it is a content performance dashboard template, which will be sharing as part of this, the PDF here that you can click on, and add your own information, or you can pair it with your own Google Analytics account, if you have that, and it'll pull in data. It should be based around mostly items that are available out of the box and obviously we've talked about a number of things here of saying out of the boxes is decent but you should go go bigger go go custom and something that speaks to your organizational understanding of content and different things on your website but starting with this reporting charter, thinking about. We're not just building a dashboard and throwing all kinds of charts on we're not trying to answer 100 different questions from 100 different stakeholders, we're telling a story. And right now we have stakeholders that want to evaluate the performance of website content by curating metrics that reflect the goals and intent of the content in other words say that there was an editorial team. An editorial team they said we're writing this content, because we want it to accomplish x y and z. And so we want to be able to look at that in the dashboard. So that they can go back to their editorial planning and content production meetings, and have the numbers in front of them and see what's working and see what's not see where they should invest more see where they should invest us etc. So in just a moment we'll jump over and I'll show you kind of what this dashboard template looks like. And afterwards, there is I think another hour for the workshop, or like a working session, we can show you how to get that set up and play around with it more and talk about customizations and stuff like that. So feel free to stick around I think the link will get passed around. I'm shortly free for you all to join. Another thing to consider with dashboards as you're, as you're telling this is is again that that audience of is this going to executive stakeholders that want to get an email once a month that just says, Here are the key metrics we identified and here's how they're all doing and here's the trend over time. So this can be this is something that's easily automated it's ready to review immediately the second someone opens it, or it can just be sent out via email or, you know, published on the website or something like that. Versus a flexible and exploratory one. Is this something that you know that power of convening right, we're going to have a meeting once a month or even once a week, where we look at how a campaign is doing. And we want to slice and dice that in different ways I'm going to say well how how are these champions that we, we partnered with to promote our content. How are they doing. Let's let's look at each of those individually, how are different channels working you know we had a big push on social media last week. So let's look at Facebook looks like a Twitter individually and start breaking those down and evaluating them as a team. So the dashboard can be a tool that is actually allowing you to explore data quickly and rapidly with your team or it can be a report that just is kind of one and done said and forget it, and it. Yeah, it populates the key information that you need. Often we go somewhere in between. We'll want sort of something, a pretty consistent report, but with a couple, couple boxes, let me change be able to change the date range. Let me be able to change, you know, a member type or a content type, something like that and see how that aspect is performing. And also as you're as you're thinking through how to develop the sort of dashboard. Not just think about the story you're telling and who you're telling it to but you know what in the organization is this going to address is it all content is it all website content is a content for editorial purposes content for a certain team. Is it event content that drives people to register for events. That will help you that'll inform what data points you need and from which platforms, because as I mentioned earlier, you have all kinds of different systems and you might be predominantly looking at website content and evaluating that but you might also want to go and pull some numbers from the other platforms. One easy one is this is an email based campaign. Here were open rates and our click through rates that we could put on the dashboard and now let's see how that what that translates to within the website performance from that channel. The dashboard look like this probably sounds really silly it'll look like a dashboard right but get get take a moment to get some inspiration. See what people are looking at if if it's a crowd that that really loves infographics you can make it more colorful and more fun and have it sort of weaves the data in and tell stories that way it might make it more engaging. If it's, if it's an audience that is, you know, want something very cut and dry. Don't do that give them give them a very bog standard old school dashboard with, you know, like basic branding and make it feel like like theirs like it belongs to the organization and isn't isn't surprising in any way. I'm going to trust that data more if it comes them in the format that they're expecting and that they, they see other data and so look to other reports and other other sources, ask, ask the people who will be using it. How do you like to receive your data what, let me see some examples and base it on that. And then that gets that last part, who's going to use it how often they're going to use it. And how will it be maintained because one of the dangerous things with data is you start tracking you start collecting. You build a report, and then no one it doesn't go anywhere and you walk away from it and then six months later a year later, three years later, someone opens it up and says, What is what is this I what does that mean that doesn't look right. And now your report that has languished and not been maintained has, you know, called into question other tracking opportunities or other data that's been collected along the way, because it's wrong. You know, or it wasn't wasn't updated with all of the things that have changed over the course of those three years. So make sure you have some plan to, to keep, keep looking at it. Make sure it's, it's functioning correctly or deprecated if it's no longer needed. That's a big thing with data. If it hasn't review it once a year, if it hasn't been needed in two years, get rid of it for market for deprecation so that people can see when they're using it. They kind of have to cross that line of caution tape of like okay I, I know I can't rely on this but I'm going to look at it for you know just my own sake anyway. So yeah using the using the dashboard. And I think here, see if I can get here and then flip to this piece. So when you click on this link, you will come to this dashboard. And let's make the best full screen apologies for my gigantic monitor, but when we look at this we can click the use template button, if you follow the link it should come straight here. You click use template and then add a new data source whatever you would like from your own Google. You can copy it with any Google accounts you have access to. And then you just click copy report and I'm going to copy it with the same data in it because it's Google sample account and I don't worry about that. And you'll be in an edit mode where you can move all kinds of stuff around, you may not want to do that right away but you can just go to the view mode, and this is how a typical user would experience dashboard. You don't need to change the name because you don't need copy of the other. But what this dashboard looks at is a number of kind of out of the box standard GA information that you can use to start evaluating aspects of your, your website and how your content is performing. So these top level sets are ones you may be familiar with if you've already looked at web analytics data. We have users and we have page use. Page use are our views users are the visitors to your site. We also have pages per session. This number is interesting because sometimes you might have a site where you actually just want people to read something quickly and then leave. And if the pages per session are really high then it means that people are poking around and looking at a bunch of different things. A session is basically one visit to your website. So people might be poking around and looking at a bunch of pages before they find what they're looking for or realize that it was on page one. So it might be a UX thing that you could you can address there. Alternatively, and I think this is a Google's say here is a kind of e-commerce based site. You probably want multiple pages per session because that means they saw an item, added it to their cart, went to the checkout page and checked out that's that's probably four pages right there. So you have to have that level of context to start filling that in. And, and unfortunately dashboards are easy to add kind of annotations to so this is just a little note that I explained all that with that. Let me just add, you know, in the in the edit mode. That's a really great use of of the dashboard is coming back and telling that story don't just put the number there. Explain why it's important and help help your, your viewers should read it. So what's available here. You know, number one, we can look at how many people that we have coming over this current date range I think the default is 28 days, a lot of date range there. But you can set it to a number of things or do a customized one, if you would like. So what that'll do is it'll compare how many visitors you got in this period and actually here you can see it's from about September 29 through October 26. So it'll show us the daily average for visitors daily average for page views that pages per session. Also see the bounce rate bounce rate is people who are just leaving your site immediately. And they just land on it, and then an average time on page and you know this one. I include it because people like to reference it a lot. It's again just, you know, sand it out of the box. It's one of the few kind of engagement or kind of next level metrics you have when we're talking about pages it's not just did they visit it but did they bounce it and how long did they spend on the page. When you're looking overall at the site. It's a little bit tricky because you know generally like our homepage. For example, we would expect someone to spend a couple seconds there and then click on the link that they actually want to go to and then have a higher time on page on that. And one of the ways we get around that is, you know, going back to that exploratory versus standard straight narrative here is we have this page drop down so we could actually select an individual page. And if we click that now. We're all of our metrics are going to update. And we're just going to see the daily average for visitors to that page and the page the number of pages average for that pages per session gets a little weird me start looking at pages but I believe this is number of pages per session for someone who viewed this particular page. And you have a bounce rate for that page, and then average time on page, just for that for that one page. So it's a bit more focused here. One thing that didn't touch on is this 2020 benchmark so we set up this kind of neat little thing here where it compares the date range to the same date range one year previous. If you had a bunch of people come last year because of some coronavirus information you had provided, you might see a drop, or if you provide a lot of information about live events you might see a huge boost this year. But this can be a useful way to kind of just immediately get some context around your numbers. Are we doing good. Are we doing average. Are we noticing a huge, you know, change. This is good for investigating right if the bounce rate suddenly drops or goes up. What's causing that. Do we have the same number of visitors but way higher pages per session. Okay, what what's what's going on are people having trouble finding things is our content suddenly more engaging. There's a number of ways to read into that. The timeline here can actually show show this day by day right and so we can see that the trend line is pretty similar so the green the dark green is users and that the dark orange is pages. And that light green and light orange are users and pages for the previous year. So we can see that there's a pretty similar trend right the spikes happen about the same time. But if you you know this one right here there was a little dip or a little jump I should say in page use on was this October 16. And then there was these these all kind of correlate. We have another one where it didn't quite follow the same, the same trajectory. So I would want to investigate spikes like this or dips alternatively. Was there a big content push did we get a media mention today. Was there an email that was sent out that we can treat treats it back to those are all good things to to dive into and just to start to get a sense of power other factors in the organization, and particularly in communications. If there are other factors outside your organization. Somebody tweeted about us, somebody shared an article. Start to get a broader sense of how, how that's impacting so there's a, yeah, good, good to follow anything you can see there with a, you know, kind of trend lines that don't. That's a kind of suddenly deviate from the other trends. What we're trying to translate to here is it looks like here you know there was a dip in this is in 2020 there's a dip in page use, but not really a dip in users. So for some reason, the users that were coming on this day for less interested in content. And then the, you can actually see this spike isn't a spike so much as it just kind of resets to that that basic trend line so, you know, little things like that are good to, to investigate see if there was an outage, see if there was a different ad campaign or or something going on there. The one other item here and this is a kind of an edit edit mode thing but I'll show you real quick is that you can set this goal line you can have as many goal lines as you want. But this is another way that's helpful for viewers to, you know, we've got an average page view line here, and we've got a views goal here, and it's a constant value of 100 and obviously this is way higher so let's set it at 1500. And now it's definitely the page there. So if we go back to view if I'm, if I'm a report viewer I can say, Oh, here is the goal that I that was set by my department or by my team. And I can see how often the line is going above or below that and, and, you know, in general, if that was actually our views goal, we're way off, you know, here we did something good. But in general, we need to, we need to boost our trend way higher. The next thing is that that that is fairly movable and that you can have, you know, a couple of lines as needed. Let's see what we're doing. Yeah, I'm just got a couple minutes here. So we talked about these metrics talked about the trend line engagement spotlight. These are any events that you do have configured on your site we talked about a couple and event on the site is just any interaction. So it can be anything from play to video to meet it to 50% of the video to scroll to 50% of the page to click the button. Anything and everything that kind of happens on your site in some way can could be captured as a custom event with the right the right sort of additional development there. And you can see here that they've just got some basic ones. There's e-commerce functionality you can just turn on and Google Analytics that I believe pulls in a couple events on its own without a lot of additional coding. Excuse me. And then the contact us it looks like they just have a button for when somebody wants to contact something contact team with with help. That's great too. And I believe. And the nice thing is if you narrow this down to an individual page, you could start to get a sense of how many times are people clicking for support on particular pages. And you could start to unravel. Is that page confusing. Our people is this flow confusing is this page at, you know, step two or step three in a particular checkout flow and people are clicking on support there because there's there's something that's just not right, or not working or not clear in the UX. You can start to really dive in and get some information there. If you can trigger a couple basic events like that. The other one I want to chat about is this traffic source traffic sources here. This is, this is huge. And I'll go ahead and say, well, you know, play with this a little bit later. Yeah, so pages again. So if I was to click paid search, it would actually filter this report again and now it's going to show me trend lines and metric averages, just based around this one slice of traffic. I want to analyze the paid search. I want to know how people are, you know, how many users is that representing do we see a bump in paid users or a decrease in paid users and, and, and yeah, it's looking like we're seeing more page views, but less pages per session which would yeah probably mean almost almost triple the daily users and a higher bounce rate. So, you know, probably say we will data there. But this could potentially be an outage. I mean, you definitely want to have clear date ranges on your reports of, you know, don't trust this data passed or before this point something like that. That could be part of it that it wasn't capturing complete data or it could mean running heavier promotional campaigns and it means now that we're going to get a lot more users that weren't actually that interested and just saw a flashy ad and clicked on it and went, this is what I want and closed it right away. You have to have some of that context around campaign planning and again the external or internal factors within your organization to know what's going on there. But the nice thing is you also can drill down here. And that should give us for paid search will probably just see, yeah, Google CPC so if you ran multiple different channel ads or multiple different ads that would shake out in here and we'd start seeing that on the pie chart. The state is for the basics of it's Google they're only running Google ads for a Google page go figure. Okay, so we look at that, and I'll just step to these real quick here. And this page is a real of the stack by bar chart here because you can start to get a sense of your top pages. So, okay, let's see. Okay store is our fourth most visited page, and most of the traffic is from direct but also, again, we have a kind of a chunkier piece of the paid search, compared to other pages which, you know, if that's your campaign and that's where paid search traffic is meant to go. That's a good sign. For referral is meaning links from other people that are driving traffic to your site. You can get surprised and see like oh this, you know, a big, a big slice of this is coming from referral traffic so I wonder why this this partner this these websites are sending traffic to us. If you didn't have that in your plan you weren't expecting it. Another good thing to track down and see what's going on there. And you can also see this kind of just another view of this stack bar chart. Not only the number of total number of pages which again will be sorted by the top there, but also how many people entered there. That is the entrance percentage so 66.6% of pages were entrances to the site and you see I hovered there too. So it was interested by pages not by users. But yeah so 66.6% of visits to the homepage were entrances, but that means that there was, you know, nearly 35, about 35% of people that navigated to the homepage and didn't enter there or backtracked to the homepage. Another thing to evaluate men's apparel, you're pushing that one, you can see that, you know, almost 20% of traffic of the page views actually just landed straight there. If that was a campaign you were running then that might be a good sign or you might have been expecting, you know, 80%. So, you've got to set goals that are specific to the pages themselves and know, know what the expectations are as you evaluate this. Then you can also see the bounce rate by page here. And one other thing I'll just mention real quick is the source and pathway analysis one. We hear a lot from folks that they want to be able to understand, you know, when someone landed on this particular page, where did they go next. And so the way you would do that here, let's say it's this basket.html one. Actually, this is a little bit tricky way this works you uncheck everything first. Look for basket.html you can see there's a couple, the dot and the plus in the single user that they came to those that was obviously a typo of some kind but we'll go ahead and check them all all four of those just to include them all for this purpose. And then you can see for anyone who viewed those pages. Here's where they landed. Here's where they were coming from there should be an entrance one because it looks like there were a lot of entrances there. But you can also see that a lot of them were coming from the homepage or from the store page, or from some of these quick view pages. And then I think this is yeah these are just the pages and so you can start to just see that in the chart of how that particular page performed. That is a super quick high level look at all of these metrics that are available to you out of the box. And so there's a lot of really powerful, powerful stuff in here. But beyond that, we've also got a lot of the customizations that we talked about earlier. So, these are some common ones that we've seen that you might already be thinking you need or would be interested in seeing in that and that sort of dashboard. Are there filters or calculated fields that I could use to narrow that report experience and a good example is that that page one at the top. And a couple of people come back to us and say oh my pages, you know everything for this team has slash sustainability in it. Okay great well that's you can actually teach Google to me can search for in the page filter that's one way to do it. But you can teach Google to understand that anything that lives at slash sustainability or under in the subdirectory in the URL string is sustainability content and then you can have a nice report. That was a nice drop down that you can click on to just filter immediately by sustainability content becomes very user friendly. Also anyone going into Google analytics could then add that dimension and just quickly modify any of the standard reports to look at just sustainability content, which gets into that grouping by taxonomic data. If that's available in your URLs, you can start to pull it in immediately. And there's ways to do that within Google analytics and within the filters on the report. But also there are even if you have a WordPress site there are WordPress plugins to quickly start pushing that data in via GTM Google Tag Manager. That's a good. I think Google is now recommending that for for all setups to just do load analytics code by GTM audience segments, another big one there. We can start to understand the audiences who is coming to the site based on what they viewed. So if you if you're capturing that taxonomic data you can say show me an audience of anyone who views sustainability content. How did they perform on the site versus all of our other. All of our other traffic or if you've got another taxonomics, how did sustainability work versus. I don't know pollution. And, and, and, yeah, get the captain planet and the, forget what the captain planet equals in the missus was the alternate captain planet, but you see the two teams there. Let's also look at intended audience. If we've got that taxonomic data, did the people who I intended to see this content actually view it and did they like it better than the other audiences that are coming in doing this page. Link tagging is another one, UTMs are the basic one. That's ready to go already that wasn't in the in the dashboard that we just showed you, but you can easily add that by just adding you know campaign or medium. And I think even content. You can quickly get a sense of how did traffic coming from particular campaigns or from particular people I have shared a link to broadcast out. How did that perform. How did that look compared to every other group on that was coming to the site. And you can, there are default channel groupings that you saw there on that pie chart, you know, email, social paid search, etc. But you don't have to use those are default ones so you can change them based on your understanding of your traffic in your audiences that you're looking for. And finally, some of the common engagement ones that are now standard in GA version four would be scroll depth and downloads. You're still using universal analytics otherwise known as Google Analytics version three, you need to add these manually. If you switch to Google Analytics version four, these will be captured automatically. Although I think when we work on implementing that for our, our clients will tweak them a little bit, not super happy with the out of the box implementation, but it is something that you can get quickly, just by switching to GA version four. And with that, when to see if there was any other, any other questions. And if you all wanted to. Yeah, I think I think the has the link gone out for the. Yes, that's okay great. So there's a link in chat that you can use to join the office hours and we can dive into this dashboard more. And make sure you had to set it up. Basically answer any, any questions you have around that. And as well I want to, you know, leave the last couple minutes here as for, for any questions that you may have immediately if you can't come to that or attend. I know everyone's muted I think you can, you can put questions in the chat, if you need to or maybe, I don't know, this is their way to mute folks. So if you have any questions feel, feel free to drop them in chat. We're going to close this down in a minute or two so we can open up a new zoom for office hours. But thank you so much everyone for joining us and diving into the great world of KPIs and kind of performance dashboards. I hope to see you at the office hours if you can make it feel free to reach out to talk to me or Rick or anyone else at Parsons CKO about how we can help you with your data strategy needs. Thanks again for coming.