 Welcome everyone to Intermediate Google Analytics Beyond the Basics for Legal Content websites. I am Laura Quinn and will be your guide to this webinar, which is brought to you. We actually, I realize we don't have any slide for LSNTAP in here. LSNTAP, I think we all know LSNTAP is a fantastic community for legal services technology, which has a great website and lists serve among a lot of other things. This particular, so LSNTAP does a bunch of webinars. This particular webinar is created and facilitated by IdeaWare, which is a program of tech impact. I am an expert trainer at IdeaWare, but that's not my day job. As my day job, I am a consultant specializing in data and design for the access to justice technology world. In fact, I am currently full time at Ohio Legal Help working on their new, fairly large content and referral portal. I was recently working with Florida Justice Technology on their metrics. This is a world, both the metrics and the legal technology world that I know a lot about. I am excited to be with you today. I'm joined today by somebody who probably needs no introduction, but I will ask her to introduce herself anyway. We have Terry Ross with the LAO. Terry, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself? Sure. Hi everybody. Thanks for attending today. I have been with Illinois Legal Aid Online or LAO, as Laura said, for more than 11 years. And primarily serving as its program director. And as program director, I get to do a lot of evaluation work, which has sort of by accident or default given me a lot of Google analytics knowledge. And I'm going to share some of what I've learned with you today. I don't profess to be an expert, but I do love to use it and glean insights from it. Fantastic. All right. So what are we going to talk about today? Let me just flash this slide up for any of your colleagues who might be having any trouble getting the audio. I will just talk to Phil Time for a second to let people call that or to write it down if they realize it. If they need it. I also have on the line my colleague Sherry, who can help you with any technical issues. So if you have any problems, certainly feel free to enter that into the question pane, which I haven't mentioned yet. We love questions. Doing these honestly is kind of odd. It's like sitting in your office talking to yourself. So questions really help us to know that we're talking about things that are interesting and useful to you and to know what, in fact, you are interested in hearing more about. So please do enter your questions into the questions pane, and I will be monitoring that pretty closely to be able to take them on reasonably closely to when they come. All right. So what are we talking through? So we, as promised, this is an intermediate Google Analytics class. So we're not going to be taught. We're going to talk just briefly about some of the we're going to talk briefly about what's measurable and include in that we're not going to totally skip metrics that are pretty basic. But we're going to assume that you have Google Analytics installed, you know how to use the basic reports, and you want features and strategies to go beyond the basics. And so I actually won't take on questions that you might have that are really about kind of getting started with Google Analytics, although I do have a couple of resources very early here, like right here. If you were also not going to focus in this particular class, I'm kind of a how to we're going to do actually several live demos so you'll actually see it happening in Google in Google Analytics. But we won't be getting into the exact nitty gritty of how to set up and how to look at absolutely everything. But a great resource for all. So both the basics and all of the things that we'll talk about in more detail is the Google Analytics Academy. The classes on the Google Analytics Academy are surprisingly really practical and good. They are, I don't know why I say surprising, but they are not just kind of like here's some reports and let us walk through what the definitions of these reports are. They're very focused on how you might use that information for your own needs. There is a Google Analytics for beginners. The advanced Google Analytics includes a module about measuring content sites, which applies certainly to those of us who have legal content. Don't quite remember what's in power users. There's also a getting started with Google Tag Manager. We're going to be talking about Tag Manager a little bit. They're all about, they're broken up into modules. They're about two or three hours to get through the whole class. They're self-guided. Definitely worth a look. So I talked about what we're not doing. What are we actually doing? So we're going to start a little bit by talking about measuring success in quotes and what that might mean and how that ties to what one might do in Google Analytics. So kind of the strategic view on this. And then we'll talk about tying that to what is in fact measurable using Google Analytics. And then do a little more of a deep dive, including live demos on three particular things, segments, goals, and dashboards, which are three things that we think are kind of particularly interesting and often people don't completely know how to go about using them. So that's what we have on our agenda. I'd love to hear just for a second from you guys as to what is most interesting for you to hear. So either from that list, what's most interesting to you or just kind of one thing, one question that you're really hoping will be answered. You'd be really disappointed if we didn't answer through this session. Take a minute and enter something into the chat so we can get a sense as to what people are hoping to hear. And the world people are writing. Terry, I'll just ask you, do you have any other suggestions for people who are kind of looking for resources on how to get started with Google Analytics? So kind of more of the entry level stuff. Well, I think there's a ton of resources out there. I do think that the Google Analytics Academy is the best one. And it's a very, for those of you who are interested in e-learning, it's a very interesting experience. So I think they do a good job with the online learning piece in those modules. And you can certainly Google, write anything regarding Google Analytics and you'll get a zillion results, even something really specific. So if you're looking for how to, there's plenty of resources out there. Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic. And seeing some things coming in and hopefully others are chatting. Vivian mentions definitions of success. Absolutely. Hi Vivian. Yes, we'll definitely take that on because in fact it is a key issue. The idea of are you really measuring what you think you're measuring or what is something that is measuring success. We'll take that on specifically. Well, their thoughts. No one has anything at all. They're hoping to get out of this class. But yeah, Whit is mentioning when we don't want contacts or sign ups. Yeah, like so a lot of these, a lot of what you'll look at online in terms of more advanced stuff is focused on kind of e-commerce goals or sign up goals. And so it's a little hard to interpret how that might apply to a more basic websites. And even how you might define basic. We'll definitely be looking specifically at legal aid things. So things like content only websites or thinking through what goals might be when you don't have a specific conversion goal. Fantastic. Great. Thank you. And I'm seeing other folks playing and seeing a lot of people I know. Hey, Jonathan. Thanks everybody for these. These thoughts and we'll make sure to work those in. All right. Let's think about measuring success. So it's hard to measure a content website because it's hard to measure success. So are we going to say success is simply the number of people who saw it? Probably not. That seems pretty, you know, unsatisfactory. The number of people who engaged with it, another word in quotes here, which we would have to define in of itself what it means, the number of people who learned from it, the number of people who lives were actually changed by it. I mean, I think we'd all love to be able to say, you know, we'd like to change lives, but that's probably not something that you're going to get from Google Analytics, unfortunately. So, yes, we need to then translate those metrics by sorry, those kind of success factors into things that you can actually measure, which is not at all an obvious thing to do. So, you know, here are some on the right and we'll talk about all these things, things that you could measure, you know, click events, bounce rate, goal conversion. Well, one of these actually tells you who engaged with it. All of those are open to discussion, you know, open to deliberation by your own organization. So there's no cut and dry answers to all of this. So for that reason, it's really important to start with a plan. So to basically not just kind of say, all right, and we're going to in general take a look at Google Analytics and get some information from it, because it's an incredible rabbit hole. And that's a strategy that could take a full time person, you know, their entire job, but more likely will result in no one doing anything because it's far too amorphous to actually act on. What I'm showing here is something that a few of you may be familiar with. This is a model that I worked on on a different project called the Drake equation for access to justice. It basically, and there's a bunch of information behind this pyramid. It basically looks at ways that we could start to measure the impact of access to justice technologies. Starting with kind of thinking about our how many people are we targeting with this technology, how many people are able to use it, and then thinking about how many people found it, and then how many people actually received the benefits from it. Google Analytics is particularly useful in the founded and received benefits area. Certainly how many people found it is going to be a pretty cut and dry set of metrics, which we probably won't even talk a lot today, because that would fall more into the basic. But received benefits is the type of thing that you could parse in a lot of different ways, like what, what does it mean to receive a benefit, and how are we going to measure that. That's the type of thing that will definitely dive into when we start to start to talk about measuring things and goals and stuff like that. Having a positive outcome is probably in most cases going to be beyond Google Analytics. It's certainly not beyond the possibility of things that you could track, but it's probably not going to be tracked in Google Analytics. You could go probably so far as to say, you know, they've created a document, for instance, but that's probably more a benefit because the outcome would be whether in fact that document succeeded in changing anything for them. So, actually, let me pause and ask Terry. Terry, how do you think about this idea? This is a hard question, so we'll put Terry on the spot. How do you think about this idea of connecting kind of the strategy for measuring things to specific things in Google Analytics? So you have a kind of a way to say these are things that we are focused on and these are things that we are not? Yeah, I think you find, the more you use analytics, you sort of find what you think are more important measures through, just in part through, honestly, trying out different segments, different filters, different kinds of customized reports, and seeing what it gets you. One thing that we focused on, we think of, we look at engagement, right, as an indicator of someone receiving a benefit, right? Are they engaged in the site? Are they clicking on things? Did they watch a video? Did they submit a form? Did they scroll? How long were they there? How many pages did they view, etc.? Absolutely. Yeah, and we're thinking about this right now for Ohio Legal Help and actually creating a plan for, so right now we have a very high level plan, which is approximately at this level of detail. There's very little behind, you know, how we would actually measure these things. And then we've done it absolutely the other way around. So we've implemented a bunch of very detailed metrics and we're in the process of building a plan to connect the two, which is basically what are we actually looking at when and to make what decisions. I'm a big believer in the idea that if you don't plan a schedule to look at things and you don't tie things to metrics to meetings or decision points, then it's likely that you're not going to use it as much as you could. You're not going to use the metrics as much as you could. So basically trying to make a plan for that is to when we're using what metrics and for what is an important step that we'll get to in the next month or so with Ohio Legal Help and we'll likely, Ohio Legal Help has been making a lot of things public, so we will likely make that public. All right. And thinking about that it's possible that your definition of success may simply not be very measurable through Google Athletics, at least, and possibly in the world right now. There's unfortunately a lot of things we might want to know that is just not knowable in the methods that are available, especially if you do not have technical control over your website. If you can go in and change the code of your website, then there is a lot more possibilities and we'll talk just briefly about what's made available to you by that. But if you don't have technical control over your website, then basically you're limited to the things that Google already tracks and knows, which is certainly sizable and we'll talk through what it is. But it likely doesn't include all of the success measures that you might want. All right. So I'm seeing a number of questions, which I think are just our initial questions still coming in, which I'm excited to see. Definitely. We have time at the end for questions. Some of these I'll probably move to the end as we talk to things in general. And some of them may be a little more tactical than we'll get to depending on how much time we have at the end. All right. Let's talk about what is in fact measurable. So we've talked about, all right, well, it's great to have a plan and that plan you need to temper your expectations based on what is actually available. Let's talk about what is available. All right. So here's the basic volume metrics that probably aren't going to surprise anyone. So basically the number of users, the number of page views, the number of sessions, perhaps based on key demographics. So this is the type of thing that easily goes into an evaluation report to a funder to be able to say how many people are coming. It gets a little more interesting when you start to think about engagement metrics. Again, I put engagement in quotes that doesn't actually have any standard meaning. It's basically whether people are doing things on your site, not just whether they show up, but whether they are finding it useful. So repeat users, pages, procession, maybe average time on page. We're going to talk in just a second a little more about average time on page. Terry, I know that you mentioned that you think a fair amount about engagement. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you think about things like repeat users and pages, procession? Sure. So one thing to note in terms of how I segment, which I'll demonstrate in a little bit. So repeat users are great. And you want to look at their behavior more closely because they came back. So what is it that they came back for? And then pages, procession is always good to look at. Again, it's better to segment. So we have some pages on our site that answer a specific question, and those have a very high bounce rate. And so those are going to have, you know, if I segment out those visits, right, then I can get a better sense of what are the more in-depth pages that people are looking at. What are they clicking on? Does that answer your question, Laura? Yes, thank you. Yeah, and I actually just flipped ahead a little bit to, because you mentioned bounce rate, and I kind of suspected you were going towards a place that is critically important, but is something that you quickly hit as soon as you start to explore pretty much any of these metrics in detail. So for instance, when you talk about engagement metrics, people often talk about the bounce rate. So here's the official definition of the bounce rate, which I know that people are often slightly confused about. So it's the percentage of visitors to a particular, sorry, this is a web page, who navigate away from, a particular website, who navigate away from the site after viewing one page. So it could be like, okay, here's the bounce rate for a page, because people came in only to that page and left. But for instance, this could mean, so perhaps they navigated to your page from, you know, they found it in a search, they came from Google search engine, they spent 10 minutes reading your information and found exactly the answer they went looking for and proceeded to, you know, do exactly what they needed to do. That's not a failure at all. That's success. So it's important to think about all of these metrics as potentially being either good or bad. So like for instance, if we think about the average time on page or the number of pages on session and session, maybe people go to lots of pages because they love everything you have. Or maybe they just can't find anything. They're clicking all over the place in order to, in order to find it. So it's important to have all of these kind of to think about them in context. So basically going back to what Terry was saying about pages per session, that some of these, it's going to depend on which pages you're talking about. As you think about things like the pages per session and especially things like the bounce rate. I'll actually have an example later on when we look at dashboard. A student example where bounce rate can be really useful. But there's also a lot of circumstances in which bounce rate is not particularly useful. So Terry, with that context of kind of other things about engagement, kind of this holistic look at bounce rate and kind of variability of what these might mean. Anything else to add about engagement? No, I think engagement, all of Google Analytics metrics start to make more sense once you start segmenting your metrics and comparing them against other segments. One of the things, you look at these numbers and they don't really mean anything, right? Because you don't have anything to compare them against. And so that's one thing that segments can give you. Right, or to compare them over time or to look at different goals or so some of the things that we'll be showing them. But yes, I totally agree that saying, oh, great, I have 7000 new users. Is that good? Who knows. Great. Kind of on page. This is a deceptive metric. It feels like it should be very useful, but is probably not as useful as you would hope. So there's problems with it. So for instance, it doesn't know when a user has the page open on a tab, but is in a different tab. So if they've left the tab open, then it will start to rack up the time on page. And on the flip side, if they leave the site from the page, then either the time is zero or that is deleted from the metric, depending on what reference you look at for that. But certainly it is not. So if you have a high exit rate for the page, then the time on page is going to be affected. So this is worthwhile to consider as you compare pages to each other. Certainly the idea that one has a much higher time on page than another page might be meaningful. But it's important to not think about it in a vacuum because it in fact is affected by all of these other things. So if we're dissatisfied by those engagement metrics and as you get into the world of kind of higher budget content websites, especially, and certainly just higher budget, you know, business world websites, many people are dissatisfied with those engagement metrics. One of the most straightforward ways to get more information is to use Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager, let me just, it was hard to figure out what order to put these slides in because everything relates to anything else. Google Tag Manager is designed to help you to manage the snippets of code that you might want to put in your website for various things, one of which is Google Analytics itself. So the idea of it is that you put Tag Manager, you install it just like you can install Google Analytics by putting a little bit of code on each page of your site, and then you install Google Analytics through it. So this is something that you can't do unless you have technical access to your site or somebody does. But if you have technical access to your site, then it's not overwhelmingly complicated to install Google Tag Manager. And there's some things that you get relatively easily out of the box. So things like number of clicks, so to be able to, so I didn't actually pull a setup page, set up page green. They're basically Tag Manager allow, it gives you a fairly complicated but a drag and drop interface to allow you to say, I want to send something to for a tool, for instance, Google Analytics, when something happens. So basically all of Google Tag Manager is basically in the realm of when X happens, so when something fires, then sends knowledge about that and some data to this tool. And this tool is often, and especially in our circumstance, Google Analytics itself. So I can say, for instance, something that's very easy and fairly out of the box with Google Analytics is say, when anybody clicks any link, send, send notice back to Google Analytics, and that will allow me to track the number of clicks on the site. I could say, I want to track the number of people who spend more than 30 seconds on this page. And that will give me a more accurate representation of how much time people are spending on the page. And I can do, if I have custom access, I can do a lot more. What we're looking at is Ohio Legal Helps, Google Tag Manager, and for instance, we have the ability to track when somebody opens the accordion on our topic page. So it's basically a plus or a minus that you can open and close. So we can track that. You can fairly readily set up download links, specific links. You can probably figure out how to do pretty much anything you'd want to do with enough technical know-how and Tag Manager. So basically the takeaway here is, if you're interested in going beyond the engagement metrics in Google Analytics with somebody who is technically savvy but not necessarily a coder, you can set up Google Tag Manager to do so. Other things that we can measure. What core content or features do you want many people to use? Are they using it? So for instance, we might have a success metric saying it's important to us that many people are using our guide because that's the page that we're looking at. And we could pull metrics about, so there's actually guidance split into a bunch of things here. But if it was a single page, that would be a fairly, extremely easy number to pull to say, all right, here's how many people are using it. Another thing that I'll actually show you in dashboard form is one of the important metrics to us at Ohio Legal Help is how many people are using the topic pages compared, and I'll show you what a topic page means, compared to things like the homepage. And right now, we're very, very early days and we still need to do a big publicity push. We are getting far more hits to our homepage than we are to topic pages, which is to us a sign that people aren't using the site as, certainly as it is designed and like we would hope, and we suspect probably because it's not actual, it's mostly our partners and not a lot of actual consumers using our site yet is the hope. So basically, the idea here is that you can define a pretty useful metric by saying how many people are using X, and then X is often a fairly easy thing to measure in the audience. How many people drop off in the middle of the task? Jonathan had asked earlier about tools for analyzing the user's flow through the site. I'll show this quickly in a demo just to give you more of a sense of what this does. But yeah, the behavior flow is a pretty interesting tool for analyzing exactly that. So basically, what this is showing me is starting at, this is essentially the first step of our, we have a set of content questions. We can say starting there, how many people did not choose a topic area? All right, seven people of a whole lot of sessions did not, oh, I'm sorry, that's this one. So 204 people out of 2.3 thousand sessions did not choose a main topic area. Of people who chose the family area, seven people did not go on to choose their next topic area. So we can kind of look at drop offs that way. And so we can start to think about either drop offs in general. How many drop offs are we getting at what stage? That could be a metric or drop offs for each particular thing. So is this family look worse than chronic traffic, for instance? Sorry, I know this has been a laundry list of things that are measurable. Goal completion? We'll talk more about goals, but this is, so if you kind of arrange your mind to think about the goal as something that someone was able to complete that can be knowable in Google Analytics. This could be something like a percent to assemble the form, who completed intake, who started triage, who signed up for a newsletter. So not every site has something like this, but if you do, it can be fairly readily trackable. And we'll talk about how to do that. All right, so that was a lot. We're going to start doing a little bit of a deep dive into some of these areas. Before we do that, Terry, is there anything to add or anything that you would highlight out of that kind of laundry list of things that are measurable? Did I miss anything that you think is a particularly useful thing to kind of have in your toolbox of metrics from Google Analytics? Well, I think one of the things to consider, if you're really interested in learning about how people use your site, is I encourage you to think about what are the interactions? What do they touch on the screen? What are they doing and are you tracking those things, right? So scroll is a pretty critical one for people who are viewing on a mobile device, right? If they are not scrolling on the page, they're not seeing most of the content that you're offering. And so I think you want to think about what these things are and set them up as events. And that way you can track, you can start tracking those things and seeing how people are behaving on the site and what things are more popular than others. Yep. And all of those things that Terry mentioned, so kind of the idea of events in of itself is going to require tag manager. So scroll is one that's very readily set upable through Google Tag Manager out of the box. And most things that people simply click on are pretty easy to set up in Google Tag Manager. All right. And I also forgot to solicit questions, but your questions are of course always welcome. And we're eager to take them at any time throughout, so please do enter questions if you have them. All right, but at the moment, let's talk a little bit about segments. And Terry's just going to give a brief definition of segments or maybe I will while she sets up to demo her screen. And then Terry's going to show us how Aleo is using segments. So maybe I'll just define segments and Terry, you can go ahead and seize control. Sounds good. So segments, if you're using Google Analytics and you haven't explored kind of just the quick and easy stuff you can do with segments, definitely worth doing. Segments allow you to basically say I want to compare this type of user with this other type of user. And so it, as Terry says, it gives you, so as opposed to just saying, all right, hey, there's some numbers. And I don't know what they mean. It gives you something to compare against something else. So is a very useful tool as Terry will show you Terry. Thanks Laura. All right, so what you're seeing is the analytics for Illinois legal aid.org. This is a filtered view. Hopefully all of you know how to use the filters when you're setting up your properties. And so what this one is filtering out is all known bots. It's filtering out visits where there's differences in capitalization and they're effectively the same thing. So it's filtering out. We set it up to filter out all of our staff home IP addresses because many of our staff work from home on a regular basis, and we don't want to include that in our traffic as well as our office IP address. So those are some things that you can think about about doing and let me as you know Google Analytics defaults to the current week, certainly completed week, and in terms of its time period, I wanted to expand it out. Okay. All right, so let me talk about segments. So your segments are here, right on any of these different kinds of panels that you're looking at your segment always appears here. So let me let me say that I have a lot of segments. I have done a lot of experimentation with a lot of different segments. There are very simple segments to set up. And I'll just go through that with you, show you what the screen looks like. So you can set them up on demographics right so Google Analytics parses out people by age range by gender by language. So this is the language in the browser that the browser is set to affinity category. This is an e-commerce tool in market secret e-commerce. I don't use those. You can segment them by technology. So if you wanted to know who's coming to to the website from a particular operating system, our particular browser or particular device, or even a particular device brand, you can do all of those things. Behavior. So this one I use more frequently. I do use the demographics. I don't use the technology as much. I certainly segment by mobile and desktop pretty frequently and that I can show you a comparison of those two. This one is useful if you want to look at, okay, I want to see people who have viewed more than one session, or who have been on the site, the sessions have been longer than a certain amount, right? Then that gets you some more useful information rather than the aggregated. You can filter by traffic sessions or traffic sources. And so this would be, did they come from organic search? Did they enter the website directly into their browser? Did they come from a Google AdWords campaign? Did they come from social media, et cetera? And then you have these advanced segment setups. And I use these fairly regularly. Here you can set up a combination of filters. And so you can base it off of sessions or users, and you can say include or exclude, right? And so I'll show you some of these that I have done. I'll look at some. Okay. So let's go back to my list of segments. So what do I segment on? I segment on a bunch of different things. I've tested out a lot of different stuff. So what you're seeing here is, so here's an example of one that requires special conditions, right? So here I wanted to know how many people are coming to our website between the hours of 1 a.m. and 9 a.m. And there's your answer, 18%. One of the cool things when you create the segment is that you can test it right here, right? So if you're ending up with zero over here, there's something wrong with the way you've set up your segment. Okay. So let me show you a couple of segments in comparison. You can see I have different ages here. Somebody asked about fundraising as one of their questions. And one of the things I do with Google Analytics, particularly for community foundations, is you can segment by geographic area, right? And so you can say, all right, well this community foundation serves this 12-county area in my state and I want to know how many people are using us from those 12 counties. Now Google Analytics doesn't, county is not one of the geographic areas, but you can do metro area or you can do municipality, which they don't call municipality, they call it something else. And a state is a region, right? They have different names for, oh it is, it's city. Okay. You can see what, if you scroll over it, you can see what the setup is. And so for some of these, I actually went through and added all the names of the towns in the particular county. Yeah, the city is, what's that? The specific geographic area, it's the specific geographic boundaries. So if you want, the metro areas get really weird. It's like the Nielsen counties, the Nielsen region, so they're really broad, the, sorry, the metro areas. Right, so let me, I want to compare a couple, oh sorry, a couple of segments together. And so once you click your segments, you say apply. All right, so what I'm doing here is I'm taking mobile views, oh I left all users on, sorry. Mobile views versus desktop views. And then I want to see how these are different. Okay. So here's an initial look. So here are the numbers that I'm interested in, right, some of these more qualitative numbers. So people on desktop are looking at a lot more pages, about the same number of sessions per user. They're on the site for longer per visit and the bounce rate is lower. Right, and these are all somewhat expected from mobile. But that would cause me to think, looking at these, okay, well I need to dig deeper and see, is our mobile experience not as good as it is on a desktop? And I think for our website, that's true at the moment and we're working on that. I just want to say, editorial comment is that mobile traffic is making up more and more of site visits. I think 59% or 60% of our visits are coming from mobile. And so I think it's important that we all in our programs are not looking at our site on our desktop, sitting at our desk, we need to be looking at it on our phone because that's how the majority of people are experiencing the site. And it's a very different experience on the phone. Right. Okay, so now I'm looking at page views and comparing. And one of the things I want you to note that's interesting about the sparkline that's showing here is, I'm looking at this and do you notice how the page views for desktop traffic are really pronounced day to day, right? They're dropping way low, whereas you don't see that as much with mobile. And that goes back to the timing thing, right? So one of the things I have learned from these segments is that our desktop users are typically coming to us Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. And our mobile viewers are coming to us any time of day or day of week, right? And I think that's pretty important to note. And you can start segmenting, knowing that, okay, well, maybe the desktop users are actually legal professionals or some other sort of business professionals. And if I can segment out and say people who are likely to be looking at us on a mobile device on the weekend between these hours are going to be more likely to be a person in crisis and a user who we are looking to serve. And I want to look more closely at their behavior. The only other thing I want to show you, I know we're getting short on time, is Jonathan, you had asked about behavior flow. Thanks, Eric. And this is, if you haven't looked at the User Explorer tool, it's really fascinating. And I get lost in this tool on occasion. It takes a while to load up. But this actually gives you the path of an individual anonymized user that they took through your site. It tells you how many times they came back to your site, what pages they looked at, if they clicked on anything, what time of day they came, what device they were on, how they got to your site in terms of acquisition. If they, if you have events set up, if there were any event conversions. So each one of these numbers represents a person. And so you can start to see, I don't want to click on somebody who comes to us all the time. I should have reversed my sessions. And again, you see lots of somebody made a comment about Google Analytics is, is made for e-commerce, right? So there's plenty of things that I don't use like these columns. All right, so I'm just going to randomly click on one of these to show you what this looks like. Okay. So, so here's a person who came to us from Organic Search. They were first seen January 15th, last seen April 11th. They came to us on a mobile device. And if you click into any of these, you can see what they looked at. And I have found in looking at a lot of these that people tend to look at the same pages over and over again, right? They look at the information and then they come back later and look at it again. So here's somebody looking at two in the morning at post-trial relief, appealing a circuit court decision. So you can see all these things. And this is pretty powerful. It's kind of creepy, admittedly, but it's pretty powerful information for those of us who are trying to serve people better to understand how people use the site. And so Laura also mentioned, so this is an example of the page, the browser being open on the page, but I'm not interacting. There's no interaction here, right? This is a zero. So I think that's just the hitting the server, right, with the tab left open. Same thing here. Claudia asks whether it gives you the location of the user for this particular IP address. No, no, no, no. And this is not, in fact, an IP address. It's a randomized number because of, you know, that would violate their terms, right? Now, you can sometimes tell where they're at by looking at, for example, we have a set of self-help directories. And so I know if they were looking at the Champaign Legal Self-Help Center that they're probably in Champaign County, right? So there are some ways to get around that. But that Google, if you try to segment too deeply on User Explorer, it won't give you results, right? So, and I haven't figured out what the number is exactly. But when I try to do really, really, really specific segments like somebody coming on a mobile device at, in the wee hours of the morning, looking at, I live with someone who abuses me. That specific piece of content, it won't give me any results because there's too few people that it can't be fully anonymized. So that's a little bit about segments. I'm happy to talk to any of you. If you're looking, if you have other questions off webinar, I'm happy to answer any questions. And talk to you about segments. I love to talk about it. Fantastic. Any questions for Teri before she gives the control of the screen back to me and I show you a little bit about goals? Certainly she can continue to answer questions as I demo, but get it in now. You can possibly get a live demo. All right. I am going to seize control. All right. All right. So let's talk a little bit about, I didn't show my fancy live demo slide. Let's talk a little bit about goals. So I think most of us who have experimented with Google, so kind of at the basic level, have looked at goals and perhaps done a little bit with goals, but it's easy to get pretty confused or to set up something that doesn't quite work. So basically I wanted to talk a little bit about what I feel are the most kind of applicable ways to apply goals to legal aid scenarios. Because we also have, as Walt pointed out at the beginning of the session, what's super easy to find is how to have it help track shopping cart conversions. But none of us are doing that. So how does this apply to us in a legal way? So basically if you think about a goal, so Google thinks about a goal as something that basically you can say the user has arrived at or has definitively done. There's a couple of different types of goals, but I think the most useful one for most of us is that either they have arrived at a particular page. And that could be, all right, if they've signed up for a newsletter, they've arrived at a sign up page, or you could think of it as it is a goal of my site that many people who are using the site are actually looking at legal information. And I'm going to say one of my goals is they look at any of the pages of legal information, and then I can track how many people do that and a lot of different information, which I'll show you about kind of where they came from and how they progressed through the site before they did that and all that stuff. You can also use events as goals. So if you have things tracked in Google Tag Manager, you can flag those over as well. So I am going to do a live demo of how we're using goals on the Ohio Legal Help site. And what I wanted to show you is, first off, is I talked a little bit about the importance of the topic page on the Ohio Legal Help site. We are hoping very much to filter nearly all traffic for the site through the topic page. So I wanted to just first, because I'm going to be talking about the topic page, I just wanted to show you what the topic page was. So basically the idea of the site is that there are a fairly finite number, so right now there's about 50 of them, topic pages that address particular questions that the user might have. And they round up hopefully the information you'll need into one place. So here is getting your landlord to make repairs. Here is some basic information about what you should do. It has links to more detailed information, which we creatively call the detail page. So this goes to something that is not a topic page. Here is another detailed page. So there are a lot more information pages on the site that are not topic pages. And this topic page also links to all of the other resources that might help you, like for instance the ability to fill out a letter to your landlord. And the ability to, it is a weird topic to get a lawyer for, but if there are lawyers who can help you, you can see options here. I'm not actually signed in with any information, so it doesn't know for instance where I am in Ohio in order to tell me if there are, or if I'm low income, if there were low income resources that could serve me on this topic, which there aren't. But if I was a senior, it would give me some resources, some organizations specific to seniors to help me. So just, that's the quick overview of just what this topic page means. So we've set up the idea, we have a couple of goals on our site. Two of them rely on events. So I wanted to focus in particularly on this third goal, which does not rely on events. I'll show you also how to set up events. So just in general, it will, the most basic thing that it will tell you is how many people are doing it. So we have, for instance, of all the people who came to my site, 1227 did them, and that was 12% of the people on the site. There is no actual dollar amount put against that, so it comes out as zero. I could put a dollar amount if that made any sense. And sometimes I know people who put dollar amounts in order to weigh goals in different ways against each other, but certainly don't need you. One of the really important things to know about goals is it doesn't start to track the data until you set it up. So in fact, you can see in this view of data, so we're looking at about two months of work of data here, that I've only set it up about a month ago. And so I only have a month's worth of data here. And prior to that, it's simply not collecting any goals. So if you just set up a goal today, you will have no information. Let's look a little bit about how to set up and what goals you can set up. And then we'll talk about what you can do with a goal that you set up. So I just clicked on the admin link down the bottom of the toolbar. And one of the things you can do over here on the right-hand side. By the way, I was talking to somebody in the chat about content groupings. Here's the content grouping tool. So this is a way to, I have not experimented much with this. I don't know that much about this tool. But in theory, we'll allow you to say all of these URLs are together in a group that I want to call X. You need to then administrate by hand. So if you add anything to it, so if you add a new content page, you'll need to add it to the content grouping. Sorry, the sidetrack there. Here's goals. So here are the existing goals we have. So for instance, on this viewed topic page, it wants you to, it basically gives you three steps to set up an order. It likes you to set up from a template. You don't actually have to. You could just do your own thing. But it's kind of useful in thinking through, all right, which of these is most like what I want to do? Is this somebody signed up? Is this somebody, and I just decided, all right, this was kind of like someone getting directions. This may or may not have been particularly important to actually setting this up. I could do all sorts of different things as I'll show you under gold details. I can choose different things. So there are four key things you can use to define if the goal is met. So there's a destination. So basically, if they've gotten somewhere in particular, and it doesn't have to be a single page, for us, in fact, for this goal, it is many pages. It's one of many pages. You can use a duration. So to basically say, like, for instance, their session, I'll change this one, their session is five minutes or more. So it is, I'm going to consider it a goal met if I have somebody on the site for a minute or more. That's a little weird to me, because as I've mentioned before, you don't really know whether that person is happily learning lots of things or is wandering lost in your site. Pages or screens per session. So you can set us a goal. And then events. Events are going to be very useful to those who have them set up. I'm pretty sure that there is no way to set up any events except by way of tag manager or something like tag manager. So then based on which I've decided on, it will ask me to define the details. So I could basically just say, all right, I'm going to define a goal that someone reaches this specific page. Like for a newsletter sign up, you would simply use the thank you page for the newsletter. And that would be your goal destination. I have used what's called a regular expression. A regular expression just means that there is a, I'm giving it a standard definition of the pattern of what the URL might look like. And this is something that if you type into a Google search, you know, kind of introduction to Google expression or Google expression for everything under the topic directory or something like that, there is a lot. So regular expressions are widely used and there's a lot of help about them. I can assign a monetary value. You can, if you want, do a funnel. I have not had much success in, I'm sure that there are use cases in which a funnel would be really useful. To my mind, there's a lot of useful stuff you can do without it. And they're very tricky to troubleshoot, I find, to try to get a funnel working. So I'll save that for the advanced class or whoever would like to teach the advanced Google analytics class, who would probably not be me. All right, so that's how you set up a goal. And once you set it up, you'll need to wait, oh, so sorry, you can test it to make sure that it is, it will give you something. So I can hit verify this goal to see if it would work. So basically 30% of people would have done this in the last seven days based on my data. So I can say, similarly to what Terri said about her, her segment, I can tell that this is reasonable in that it brings back some data. If I have a syntax error in my regular expression, it would probably not bring back any data. So I wouldn't know I had some problems there. So once I have my goal set up, let me show you a couple of things that you can do with it. You can do many things with it, like many other things in Google analytics. There's almost an infinite rabbit hole of things to go down. But you can see it on some basic pages. So for instance, you can see it on your landing page report. So if you go in to see what pages people are coming in on, you can see your goals on that report by default. So here's all three of our goals. You can just toggle between them. And I can see the difference between those who viewed the topic page between those who came in on the home page, those who came into the about legal health page, those who came in on a I need a lawyer page, et cetera. So that's kind of interesting. And some of these are, so this is the number. So we have a, we need to change probably even our internal name for this. We have something that we call the quiz at the beginning of, so from at the home page, if you enter the home page before, between the home page and the topic page, we have a screening for contents to try to figure out what contents they're interested in. They can skip demographic questions if they want. And so this is how many people actually completed the quiz. All right. All their things, so kind of moving from there, you can, there's a whole section on conversions, which is, which will tell you lots of things about your goals. One of the things that I find most interesting, which is kind of like off the screen, is the goal flow. So, which is basically an explorer for the goal. So basically I can say, all right, so given this is my goal, that basically, sorry, that's the wrong goal. To see a topic page, I can explore different ways. So right now it's defaulting to source. So I can see where did people come from. I could change this to, I mean basically anything I want to here. So I could change this to user type. Oh, let's change it to city. So people from Columbus are viewing a lot of topic pages. I could set segments here, either in combination with or alone to see all of this data. So this is a, almost kind of like a pivot table, if you imagine, for understanding how people are interacting with this particular goal. With, of course, the idea that, so right now, just to state, we are, and I think I stated it before, we are not getting the traffic to our topic pages that we are hoping. So therefore our goal here would be to figure out, all right, who is viewing them and how can we encourage more people to do what they're doing or to be more like them, or to reach out to more people. One of the things we see, for instance, if we look at source, is that we get a lot of direct traffic to topic pages, which is a little surprising. Yeah, so by far the most, so we get more direct traffic, meaning people hit the topic page directly, as opposed to like, for instance, a search engine. That's really unusual, and we suspect that's because we have a lot of partners handing out little business cards with the topic page URLs on them. So you can go to, like, the divorce topic page or the housing eviction topic page directly. There's a lot more here. I think I'm going to stop there, because that I think gives you a sense of what you can do with goals and what goals are good for. And you can explore for yourself. Actually, let me just show you one more thing. You can go backwards from how people got to a goal. So from our particular, for our particular stuff, this is, gets a little weird because the direct links are by far the most common way that people come in. But if not a direct link, then people are coming in through the guide and you can see the pathway through the guide that they used. And so for instance, if you were to set up a goal on your site where all of your legal information was together as a goal, like did they view any legal information, or people who viewed any legal information as a goal, then you'd be able to see where people were before they started viewing legal information to kind of give you a sense of the pathways through the site, which can be a really interesting thing. All right. I'm going to, I think I actually won't go back to my slides. I have just a transition slide to transition to dashboards. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the helpfulness of setting up custom dashboards and kind of some of their limitations. They're also kind of limited. I'll do that fairly quickly because we, I want to make sure that there's time for questions. And I also, I'm going to quickly show another way to kind of get at behavior flow to Jonathan's question. Pedro asked, can I do events? I'm not sure precisely, Pedro, what you mean by that. So I have a lot of events set up in this view we're looking at. And Terry had a lot of events that, in Olayo, all of those were set up in Google Tag Manager, which we won't do a, I guess I could, if there's a lot of people, if you have a request for me to do a very quick demo of Google Tag Manager, enter into the chat and I can attempt to do that in the last five minutes, though that's me living on the edge. But that's Google Tag Manager. And not for Google Analytics. There is actually, I will defer for myself a demo that actually better, far better than me demoing that there is a Google Academy getting started with Google Tag Manager, which can answer that for you. And just another way to look at behavior flow. This is one of my favorite reports and I get really fascinated here. We looked very briefly at a slide of this. I just wanted to show it to you live. So thinking about what people are doing in the site, if you want to think about it not user by user, as Terry showed you, but instead to think about it by kind of in aggregate by page, this behavior flow will let you, in a lot of different ways, decide I'm going to drill in on particular pages. So I am clicking and expanding and drilling down to basically say, all right, I want to look at the people who started on my homepage or the people who started at, you know, my about legal help and where did they go from there? You know, to basically say, what are people doing on the site and where are they going? All right, let's talk a little bit about dashboards. I'll just take five minutes here on dashboards. So actually just a couple of quick thoughts on saving and sharing reports. So it's saving and sharing is not quite as easy as you might hope. Well, saving is just as easy as you might hope. So basically anything that I set up, if I set it up with a segment or things like that, I can then save it up in, I can save it up in the top of the, here. So basically I can save this report off and it will be available underneath my saved reports. You can also set up custom reports, though it's relatively limited in what you can do in custom reports because more and more they're pushing people to use Google Data Studio. Google Data Studio is also a great tool to know in the Google tool taking over the world. It actually also integrates very well with Google Analytics to basically be able to quickly and easily drag and drop data from Google Analytics into kind of easily shareable and customizable reports. So if you want to set up fairly complex dashboards or reports that are shared across a team, definitely worth exploring Data Studio and not shockingly there's a Google Academy, Google State introduction to Google Data Studio, which is fairly readily easily easy to use. Dashboards within Google Analytics are pretty nifty if you're trying to do what they want to do. They are unfortunately not shareable across Google accounts. So one approach to that might be saying that in fact we have at Ohio Legal Help, we have a single kind of shared account for doing the kind of some of the core things like dashboards and then we also have each individual account so we can each log in as two different people to the account. It's a dashboard. So Terry or somebody we can hear you typing might be worth muting. So this is a particular dashboard that we've been using to take a look at the same... We're not just totally obsessed with this one particular topic. It just happens to be the things I'm showing you. So to look at this issue of, all right we're not getting the people to the topic page that we're hoping. This dashboard is set up to use segments but I cannot as far as I know save the segments with it. So the first thing that I need to do is I need to set up my segments. Luckily they happen to be first in alphabetical order. So they're easy to find. So basically I have set up two different segments to basically see the people who have arrived on a topic page and to see comparatively the people who showed up on the site and their landing page was a topic page and this is something that is desirable to us. We'd really like search engines for instance to be pointing directly to topic pages. They are really not yet. We were not getting much search engine coverage at all yet. Compared to people who arrived on the home page which is by far the vast majority of our traffic right now which is presumably going to change because it's very unusual for a content site. And I did the what everybody always does. I forgot to take out all users. Bye. And so this dashboard will now show me a lot of information about this and if for instance I'm saying that the number that for instance one of our metrics is the percentage of people who arrive on a topic page and we want that metric to go up then here is that metric. So 4.25% of traffic to our site arrived at a topic page. It is not easy to configure the kind of so it's very easy to say simply I want a new widget. It's this type of widget. It's one of these. And here's the metrics that I am using. So for instance this I'm only showing a metric so I'm just going to pick it. I cannot for instance say okay what I really want to show is the percentage. I don't really care that much about the actual number. So that's it. It basically it only does what it wants to do and if you want to do what it wants to do then everything goes really well. It does a number of different things so it'll do a line chart. So it will do like here's a stacked bar. So here's an example of a really useful use of a bounce rate. So a topic page is almost by our definition for the site a page that people should not bounce from that it's very unlikely that someone will get the answer to the question from the topic page because it's intended to be a hub on the site to get further information. So by definition a bounce from the topic page is a bad thing. So we can see things like what was the bounce rate for people who arrived on a topic page and right now it is higher than the people who arrived on a home page. So not good. Things still to work on. And here's a goal completion for instance not many people at all completing this goal but certainly less those who arrived from a topic page. So super E in fact I'll add a new one just so you can see how easy it is in two minutes. So I click the add widget button here. I say let's do a, I refuse to do a pie chart because I hate pie charts but let's say we're going to do a bar chart. We're going to do, look down what I was doing here. Let's do the number of total events and we're going to group it by city. Oh sorry. Total events by city. I keep going back to this total events. Come on. Oh it's chugging. Weird. I don't have a dimension. So here we go. And the bar chart will, obviously there are a lot of cities in, I don't know what's going on there. I did test that. That is not, because there are not cities in Ohio. So that was a fail of my demo. But let's pretend those are cities in Ohio because I have done that and that works. And so I can move this around and things like that. That's kind of fascinating. Anyway, let's have a look at them. Great. Okay. So that brings us to the end of our scheduled content. Let's see. I've got one remaining question from the beginning of the course and now would be a great time to ask other questions that you might have that me and, or Terry could take on. Pedro asks, is there a way to create a heat map with Google Analytics to see where people clicked on on the page? Google Analytics does actually, doesn't know what people clicked on on a page. So that would be the type of thing that you would have to use Google Tag Manager in order to understand that there was a click on the page. And that would be a, so a heat map is not the type of thing that it's particularly, either of those tools or the combination of those tools is particularly good at. The tools I've generally seen a heat map generated through are like A-B testing tools. So something like, there's one called Evently with the .ly, I could be wrong. But if you look for A-B testing tools, you might be, I don't know what price range they're in, they might not be a very reasonable price range just to get that type of thing. Terry, any knowledge about generating heat maps? No, there are a bunch of tools. If you Google it, I looked it up. Pedro just tried to find an answer for you, didn't find a ready answer. There is a Chrome extension. If you get Google tag manager set up that you can look at in-page analytics on your site, it doesn't give you a heat map, but it tells you what percent of people on that page clicked at a given area of the page. And so that's kind of a useful tool, doesn't quite get you what you want, but it's close. Yeah, interesting. Terrific. All their questions, all their comments. I feel like this was kind of a little bit more of a mishmash than a comprehensive, you know, introductory course. But hopefully within that mishmash was some really good information that you could take back. Questions, comments? Terry, if you could define one thing that you would hope that, you know, people take away from this course and kind of play with for themselves. What would that be? Well, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that the aggregated Google analytics numbers that you get in the standard reports aren't all that helpful, right? And so I think that to the extent that you can filter or segment or set up custom reports with filters in them to apply, you can start making some more interesting findings about how people are finding your site, what's useful on your site, who is using your site, et cetera. Absolutely, absolutely. And just to use the terminology. So, Terry, you're talking about segments, right? Because filters would be set at the admin level. Oh, yeah, so I'm also talking. There are ways to filter on the, I use it frequently on the page views page, where you can filter your results. You know, Jonathan asked a question about can I filter just the self-help materials? And if your information architecture, your URL structure allows you to say, okay, I only want things that fall within this category of pages, right? And so we have a legal information library. And so I can, at that point, I can just filter on that. And it's only going to give me those page views. Yeah, great. Fantastic. And just answering my own question for myself, I was just thinking while Terry was talking what I would say, I think I'd probably go all the way back up to the strategy to not get overwhelmed by what's possible or what you can or cannot do right now, but basically to start with saying, okay, if there was three things that would help me define whether or not my site was successful, in quotes, based on this session, what would those be and start there? So obviously pick things that are actually are possible. And to basically move from there, to move from things that are key things for your organization. Fantastic. And we are at time. Thank you all for coming. This was recorded and will absolutely be available through the LSNTAP site. So if you have other staff members or other people you think might be interested, please do refer them on. Thanks so much and hope to see you at another LSNTAP or Idealware Tech Impact Idealware soon. Sorry, webinar soon. Thanks guys. Thank you. Thanks Terry.