 Welcome to our webinar, Google Analytics Measuring What Matters. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today. We do want this presentation to be relevant to the important work you do, and you will have an opportunity at the end of the presentation for a survey. And throughout the presentation you will have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in live poll questions. Before we do that, we want to make sure that everyone is comfortable using our webinar platform ReadyTalk. A few notes, you can use the chat box at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen at any time to let us know if you have problems viewing the slides or hearing the audio. The chat box is also for your questions. We will be flagging your questions and queuing your questions for later review during the Q&A session. Keep in mind that all lines will be muted so we can have a clear recording of this presentation for later viewing. In a few days, you will receive a follow-up email with a link to the recorded presentation as well as any resources we share today, including an FAQ from today's question. Remember, if you lose your Internet connection, you can reconnect using the link in your registration or reminder email. If you registered more than an hour ago, you can also access the presentation or slide deck that was sent with the reminder email. There is a link on that email you can click. If you are hearing an echo through your computer speakers or having any issues with the audio, you can always dial in using the toll free line listed in your registration email. As I mentioned, this presentation is being recorded. You will be able to find this recording at TechSoup's webinar page in a few days. This is where we share all of our webinar recordings and announce upcoming webinars. We encourage you to check it out at www.techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinar. You can also review our recorded webinars and videos on our YouTube channel. In a few days, you will receive an email with this presentation, the recording, and links. If you are following along with Twitter, you can tweet us at TechSoup or using hashtag TechSoup. My name is Susan Hope Bard, and I'm the online training producer here at TechSoup, and I'm really happy to be your host for this webinar. Thank you again for joining us. Also joining us is our expert and primary presenter, George Weiner from Whale Whale. George is the founder of Whale Whale, a digital agency that leverages web data and tech to multiply the impact of nonprofits through services, products, and content. Prior to Whale Whale, George was the CTO of DoSomething.org. Under his leadership, the organization became an innovator in social media, mobile technologies, and social cause. During his seven years at DoSomething.org, he oversaw the complete overhaul of the site twice, winning a Webby Award and nominations. Helping to build a community of over 1.5 million young people taking action. We're very fortunate to have George's expertise here today. Also joining us on the back end are Ali Bisbekean and Aria Gilbert-Knight from TechSoup, and Julie Leary from Whale Whale. And they'll be helping us capture and respond to some of your questions. Before we get started with our guest speaker, I'm going to give you a short introduction of TechSoup. TechSoup is located in our San Francisco headquarters, and you can see that on our map. George is joining us from New York. Where are you joining us from? Take a minute to type in your location into the chat box. It's always interesting to see where people are joining us from. Oh wow, Canada, Alaska, New Orleans. People are coming from all over. We have someone from Mexico as well. Thank you. While you're finishing doing that, I'm going to tell you a little bit about TechSoup. You can see from the map here, we're a 501C3 nonprofit like many of you joining us today. We're working to empower organizations around the world to help them get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help them achieve their mission. You can see that we serve almost every country in the world. We partner with 62 NGOs around the world, and the need is global. We've launched a new website, and you can see here. This website is for countries outside of the US, and it's www.techsoup.global. And this is the site where folks outside of the US would access tech donations. A few key points about our impact. To date, we've helped organizations get more than $5.2 billion in technology products and grants. These technology products and grants come from more than 100 corporate and foundation partners. Before we turn it over to George from Whole Whale, we do want to find out a little bit about what you want to learn. We want to make sure if we customize this to meet your needs. So take a moment and let us know what you hope to learn from this webinar. Me too, I know I was very interested in this webinar. I have very little knowledge on Google Analytics, so I'm looking forward to learning a lot more. Some of you are on the same boat using your statistics to get better. Excellent. Now it's our pleasure to turn this presentation over to George from Whole Whale. George, whenever you're ready. Thank you for such a great intro. I'm going to see if I can follow that up with an entertaining bit of Google Analytics for everyone. Huge thanks for having me, and I really appreciate everyone taking about the time to learn about measuring what matters. It matters a lot to me. It's one of the core tenants of why we created Whole Whale here, which is obsessed with technology and impact. This is what we do. After that Whole Whale swim, these are some of our clients. And as you said, we leverage data and text to increase nonprofit impact through our pre-resources and other services. My goals today here are really to increase your knowledge of GA, so let's see in the chat there. We're going to be answering questions as they come up. And my goals make you guys provide a framework for using Google Analytics. It's daunting. There's so much information really being created every single minute, hour, day on Analytics. And so understanding just the frameworks of an approach are super important. And it's finally, you know, I really want you to make change. I want you to make change in your organization when you go back to work. Well, I guess you are at work. I want you to make change right now. All right. I think I wanted to make TechSoup happy. These guys are awesome. This is normally a presentation that we actually would charge for through for seminars, but TechSoup has generously allowed us to do it for a much larger audience. Long-term, you can always hit us up at Whole Whale on Twitter or chat, of course. So if we can switch over just to make it a bit more concise for us, I'm really curious how much do you know? And if we can run this whole really quickly, you know, A, B, C, D, E, we can actually pull it back over to the TechSoup side and run that whole. I'd be curious to get an idea of what we're going to be answering the chat. You guys love that chat room. Blow it up. We're playing around with a poll because there's also going to be exciting poll questions that come up, and I'll be quizzing you. So believe it or not, this is going to have to be your primary screen for this presentation. And I love seeing the activity in here. So as we move into this poll, why I'm interested in it is because I can go a mile deep in some of these areas. I actually teach an entire course in Google Analytics, and it's a night course that kind of goes on for a while. Sorry, we can't get the poll working. I may just grab a share of the screen again, but I see some of the answers here. We got a lot of A, B. Oh, brilliant. There's our poll. Yay. Okay, how much do you know? Go ahead and put the screen. Yes, right now actively we can see what's going on. Oh, well, you guys are crushing it. Wow, look at us go. Beginners taking the lead. Beginners taking the lead and pulling away from the pack. It seems like no analytics. No analytics knowledge whatsoever is close behind, but it is falling behind. Ultimately, we have beginner, intermediate, and I love the 11 people now that know enough to be dangerous. Watch out now. For the advanced folks, there will be some stuff in here from you, but I expect you to get the rest of the questions all correct given that you have that. All right, super helpful. Thank you so much. I'm going to go back to our main presentation here. So most of us around that beginner, intermediate level or the interest. So here's the content that I'm going to be going through. Gather, analyze, and act. On the gather side, this is just making sure we have the right things initially out set up for Google. The analytics terms, the basics of metrics, goals, moving into analyze. I'm going to be going through misleading metrics or M&Ms. I know there's no and there, but I like the candy, so I'm putting in there. And then finally case study examples, finally how we act on this information. So lots to cover. I know we have got some beginners here. I know we have some beginners here, so what is it? You wandered into a webinar and you're wondering, well, what is Google Analytics? These are some of the basics. Google.com slash analytics is where you go. It's free. Let me emphasize this, free like puppies, kittens, and rainbows. Next, web analytics is for your website. We're tracking every single page of your site is working by using JavaScript that you put on every single page of the site. So you can tell what people are clicking on, where they're coming from, and what they're up to. Just in general, every website code base can handle this. So if you ever get that answer like, oh, well, our website can handle this, that's simply not true. It should take less than 30 minutes to install. And then finally, ultimately we're going to get really far into this, but it shows you the what, the where, the how, the when, the activities on your website, not so much the why, but hey, you can't solve all the problems it wants. This is why, most importantly, I love Google Analytics. How do we measure behavior? How do we tell what someone's up to? And in this cheesy joke, dear life, Heisenberg, giving you some chance to think about why this is funny, but ultimately, Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty states that we can't know the exact position and speed of a particle because the act of observation affects the observed. So if you think about that for a second, if we're doing a survey or if we're running a test, what people say may be different than what they do, but on Analytics, we get the sense. For those of you who don't agree with this, think about this, you know, quick joke, the last time you went to a doctor and they asked, well, how many drinks did you have in an average week? You know, there's a difference between what you do to demonstrate if there's the express. And on Analytics, you know, we're able to sort of balance when we have case studies, when we have anecdotal information that's simply, you know, hey, verbalize whatever comes to mind. We're doing user testing. Isn't this great? Don't you like this, you know, page on our website? And when it's fact on Analytics, it doesn't show up. Well, the data can prove you a bit wrong. So I promise this framework. I'm going to be showing you this framework again and again just to make sure that you understand our process. It starts with gathering, right? That top part gather data moves to asking questions of that information. We then analyze the resulting information. We find insights, bright spots, if you will, things that are working, things that are broken, understanding what those metrics are. Then finally, the act, right, how do we learn from this? How do we make a change when we go back to work in our process and our marketing and our content? So we go around this wheel and particularly when we focus on Google Analytics, but, you know, spoiler alert, this can be used for any manner of data set that you have and also should be familiar for those of you familiar with the scientific method. Okay. So we are going to do this poll until Julie says I'm doing this. How? Live. Live. We're doing this live. Okay. So is your site using Google Analytics? A, B, C, E, E. No clue. How do I check? B, no, we aren't. Yes. But the updated Analytics code, yes. The universal Analytics code. E, I just wondered into this webinar by accident and just like clicking buttons. Something for everyone out there. So we can answer this in the chat. We see some things rolling in here. I'm checking it out. We got some D. All right. So we have people that have, yeah, great, C or D. I'm going to get into that. So we may have Analytics. We can check in our code. We can ask our tech person. But I just see there's not so many E's here. You know, I wandered into this webinar by accident and just like clicking buttons. Great. Okay. So I'll let those continue to roll in. I'm keeping an eye on that. Thank you, Julie. So let's get into the Getting Started checklist. In the Getting Started checklist, we've got some fundamental things that we're going through. I just asked the first key one, right? If you're not sure it's set up, we got that key question. Is it installed on every single page of your site? Next, you know, on the staff side, who is monitoring this? And the answer hopefully is not nobody. Sometimes this is your tech person. Could be someone on the communications team. It's important to have a quarterback though because otherwise it kind of gets forgotten like that stuff you left in the Attic. Next, you know we have access. There are tiers of access. You don't want everybody to have the admin highest level access. No surprise because it is possible that you can delete it. The tiers of access that I like and I think that everyone should have access in the organization actually. While we're at do something, actually all of the interns even had view-only access. With view-only access, you can make sure that people can look at and evaluate and understand the different parts of analytics that relate to their job but not necessarily mess ending up which is huge. Next, goals. Are they set up? Are they defined? I'm not going to talk about and explain what goals are but this is something that outside of the box is not necessarily set up. Same thing with Webmaster Tools, AdWords, and then of course Dashboards. We'll be going through some of these. But just to start, here's the view on the Getting Started. Here's the view once you've logged into Google Analytics where you're going to find all of this information. So you can note home, reporting, customization, admins. You're going into the admin section. And if you don't have a view that looks like this but has access to it, your user account may not be the admin. So making sure you have the admin access. Going in, you can get tracking info. You can link things like your AdWords. User management is where you're controlling the access rules, setting up goals. So all roads lead to admin. This is where you're going to find the answers to the things in that checklist. So hopefully that's making sense. Again, if you have questions, we have some very smart people in chat who can answer them. Moving to Google Analytics terms. Here are the fundamental components. Yes, there are more but here are some of the fundamental ones. And I just like to note going down here, users, sessions, page views, bounce rate, average session duration, exit rate. The users, these are formerly known as unique visitors or quote-unquote unique. If you heard that sort of language being talked about and you look forward to Google Analytics and you're like, wait a minute, where do I find the unique? It's been changed. You're not crazy. It's changed, you know, about a year ago. And users are basically the unique visitors. Next, sessions. These were formerly called visits. Now called sessions, and again we're going to be defining these. Page views, good old page views are what 90s we referred to as hits. Anytime a page is loaded, it's tracking a page view. So if you refresh your page right now 10 times, that would be 10 page views. Very, very straightforward. Bounce rate. This is people that go to just one page and then immediately leave. Average visit duration, average session duration as it's called is basically the stopwatch that counts how long somebody's been on the site. And then finally, a goal, something that is customized and set up in your account and event. Same thing, customized setup. We have more terms and definitions at wholewell.com slash Google. And don't worry, you'll see more of that. But I want to dig in a little bit deeper here. I want to dig in and just really make sure we understand what we're talking about when we say user sessions, page views. And the generic starts here. I want you to think about a user, one person, literally trying to track that one person. And for you, let's say our breakfast consisted of a breakfast session. So breakfast at a time we sat down at our breakfast table. Hopefully we had eggs, one-page view, juice, one-page view, toast, one-page view. So that's a morning session with then three page views in it. So you kind of get the relationship, one user, one session. But then we move into lunch. So for lunch I had a salad and a burger. I was pretty hungry. So I had a lunch session and then two page views. Moving down to dinner, we are using each individual meal here, hot book, page view, steak page view, and of course, you have to have one page view. So during this day, this one user had three sessions, breakfast session, lunch session, dinner session, within three page views, two page views, three page views. For the math pages at home, hopefully you got eight total page views, three total sessions, one user and a paratree. Strike that there was no paratree involved at all. Basics, bounces and exits. So here is a very, very basic look at what happens. This little blue thing is, let's say the home page of your site, a user enters. They only look at one page and then they leave. They go to Facebook, they go somewhere else. That is counted as one bounce and one exit. The bounce, I think it's like a bouncing ball off the ground or somebody, let's say, walked into this webinar and said, I don't want to take Google Analytics and immediately left. It's a signal that someone didn't find what they were looking for and they immediately left from that page. Next, let's say we have an entrance and they go to one page and then two pages, they go to the second page inside of your site and it'll be about page and then they leave. There's no bounce recorded there because someone technically potentially found what they were looking for in the about section, went to it, and then they exited from the about section. So that's a start of understanding bounces and exits and we can use bounces as a way of understanding if people like what we're giving them when they land on that first page. Bounces don't just have to be the home page. It can be any page of your site, any page that they're first interacting with or the landing page. Next up, demographic information. This is just super cool. When you upgrade to universal analytics and noting down here, how to tell in the code, universal analytics uses the analytics.js library and the old analytics using ga.js. You can search in your code base and understand that if you look to grab new code from that admin section where I showed you inside of Google Analytics, if you look in there, it's going to be giving you only the updated stuff. So if you've implemented it recently within the last year, plus it's going to be the new stuff. So why it's so cool is look at this. This is amazing. It's actually going to be able to aggregate and aggregate again, give you for the information you can tell based on ad tracking, your age demographic. This is wild. I literally did cartwheels. I don't do cartwheels well, but I did cartwheels when this came out. Male, female, age, and we did this whole distribution for traffic sessions. So let me move on to measuring what matters. And this is more for the impact nonprofit that walks out there, which I proudly count myself alone. Inputs, outputs, outcomes. So when we're measuring our logic model and understanding what the inputs are, the inputs are like what we invest in our organization, the outputs, what we're making, and then finally the outcome, what we expect to happen in 10, 20, 30 years from now, how we're making the world different. When I'm in the Google Analytics land, some of the inputs and outputs that we can measure, just for example, are we even way pre-PDS or photos? Are there classes such as TechSoup? So if I were TechSoup, we're creating webinars. We can tell signups. We can actually tell even in Google Analytics the number of clicks to conversion if we've set it up properly. Outputs potentially, what people are engaged with, certain signups, maybe downloads of a resource, a guide, a how-to. Maybe we've got teacher training documents. Well, we can track all of those things through Google Analytics. You know, long-term, and I want to set the limit here, if we can't really tell health literacy, healthier world, that kind of thing, we can't really tell with Google Analytics, but we set up goals for the inputs and outputs that are predictive. And this is an important word that are predictive of our long-term outcomes so that when we look at Google Analytics, it's not, oh, that's nice, but so what, but it's, wait a minute, if we have, for instance, more teachers downloading, more guides on art curricula, we're going to improve the quality of art for those students. And if we do that longer, over a period of time, we're going to have more informed programs that work all around art. So this is something that takes a lot of work. We do in-depth work at this and that, but it's important to align it. I've been talking a lot about goals, though. And what do I mean? So I don't know if there are any Women's World Cup fans here, but especially, let's go, U.S. What happens in soccer game is that the team that wins isn't necessarily the team that spends the most time with the ball. We can get upset sometimes with, oh, yeah, they spent this much time on the site. They did this, this, and this, but really what matters are goals. That's what wins the game. And so in Google Analytics, we can set up desired actions. Let's say when somebody signs up for newsletter or somebody clicks the Donate button, goals are actually tracked inside of Google Analytics that you can figure. I'm going to use an example now to make this a bit more tangible. PowerPoetry.org, an organization that we've worked with for the past three years, it's an organization that has now become the largest for teams in online poetry, online, and it's a safe place for teams to share their poetry. But what we care about for this, and I want to see if you can spot the goals. Look at this page. What kind of things would you want to track? Just on their own page. Of course we're tracking across on the first one. Website here, but what kind of things would you want to track? Can you see one thing you potentially, two, three, four? Did you find all of them? Think about it. Add a poem. We care about teams adding poems to the website. Did they log in? Did they sign up? Did they connect via Facebook? Well, hopefully sometimes people will miss this one. Any time we have a form, do they submit that form? All of those things then are, you can see in the admin section, set up as goals and they're configured because Google doesn't know what is the goal or if a kid is added a poem. You need to tell it that. And this is where you configure it, and this is so important to define what matters for your website. Okay, moving on to Analyze, unless Julie has any sort of comment for me. She's giving me the thumbs up. She's really the boss here. So continue to chat with her and keep her occupied. Okay, we're moving on to Analyze. M&M, if you remember are the misleading metrics. So the misleading metrics here are users. I thought we understood what users were. Well, I'm going to see if you do. So how is this possible? In this case, there's always this calendar select tool on the top right. There's always this calendar select tool. In this case, when it's selected together, so we select the three months and we get 2,000 users. Okay, great. I report this and later I go back and I select and add it up month by month. In June there's 1,500. Okay, I select June, select July. Okay, there's 1,000 users. I selected that and I record it. I go back and I change my date range and I select August 1,200 users. Wait a minute. Suddenly if I go month by month, there's 3,700. I'm going to give you some time to think. Wait a minute, is Google Analytics broken? What's going on? This is the kind of thing that can confuse people. Remember, users are unique. That is the key word. Users are unique. And so when we choose a time frame, what Google Analytics is doing, because they use cookies, not the delicious chocolate chip kind, but more of the creepy web kind, in this case, helping us, they use cookies in your actual browser to track when you come back. They can tell you're unique over the exact period of time. So when you select over a three month period of time, let's say you're drawing every single month, you're counted as one user, assuming you're using the same browser. Now that cookie, believe it or not, that cookie is going to last for a given person that goes to that website because Google Analytics is setting. It's going to last for about two years. Crazy, right? So this time frame is actually very helpful to know that we're tracking somebody for that long. There's also a session cookie that lasts about a half hour that's also used to track sessions as well. So Google Analytics is both looking at the cookies, all of the user that comes to the website, and creating new ones. Yes, you can argue, it's super creepy and annoying, but we're using it for good. So more power to us. All right, quiz time. So I'm looking at our experts here and dangerous people. Here's the quiz. It's nonprofit.org homepage and spends five minutes browsing two pages. They leave the site for 20 minutes. They get a coffee. They return and spend another five minutes browsing two pages. Here's our whole thing. Two pages, 20 minutes off, go somewhere else. Maybe turn off the computer, come back on, turn it on, go back to this. And then spend five minutes browsing two more. Your options are A, B, C, C, great. So hopefully you can move over to the poll and see what we're doing. So we're going to actively wait for it. I know we're excited about the chat, but I want to use the poll because I want to see how correctly we're answering that. And B is also a hot lead. B is pulling away. But oh, right on its back is A. Two sessions, four pages. Seems to be gently pulling away. Who is going to come up over here? Boy, we should have side bets on that. Oh boy, session one, session four pages. Seems to be ebbing out how many sessions and page views are recorded. Is it one session and four page views? It seems to be a race between A and B. Oh, we have one soul who thinks I'm tricking them with other. I respect that because I want to see. Oh, wow, almost a dead meat. Okay. Okay. And this also, I'm doing this just to make sure that this is your primary screen. We're going through a lot of things. We're having some fun here, understanding basics and analytics. And this really pushes it to it. So we are kind of split here between A and B. Okay, so if I were doing a dollar bet, which I'd like to do, I'm going to go back to sharing. And the big reveal, I can't wait to find out the answer. Drumroll, B is the correct answer. Oh boy. So what happened all of you, A-Fof? What was going on? This is one session, four page views, and one user. Remember, I kind of gave you that hint that those session cookies last for 30 minutes. I don't know if somebody picked it up. Maybe not. So a session cookie lasts for 30 minutes, which means that even if I go away, as long as I come back in that last interaction, as long as that last interaction was there, before that sort of stroke of 30 minutes pass, we're getting that information. And so you're able to understand, hopefully, that that one session is tracked across and that sort of breakfast session, if I go away and I come back and have some food, it's actually helpful to understand that, like, oh, this is an entire routing session that may go away because sometimes there's questions of, oh, they go to another tab and then they come back for it. And then they come back for a page and click on things. So it's technically counted when somebody comes back clicking on that page and clicking on that activity. All right, next question. M&M, misleading metrics. Quiz, a user visits nonprofit.org homepage, spends three minutes scrolling through the page, just the homepage, and then bounces meaning they leave the site from the homepage. Question, how long does Google Analytics record for that session, A, B, or C? So if we move to the poll, we can bounce over and understand how long does Google Analytics record the session duration? How much? Let's go. All right, A, off to a wild lead out of the gate. Trailing, not too far behind is C with zero minutes. Some people are thinking it's more than three minutes. Interesting, so you're saying, oh, well, maybe they don't close out that session, the clock keeps running. I don't mind that thought. I like that thought. If you're thinking zero, I'm not sure what you're thinking. Maybe you're thinking I'm trying to trick you. If you're thinking A, three minutes, of course, we spent three minutes, and then I left. Why wouldn't it be A? That's logical. Why wouldn't it be A? Or am I trying to trick you? All righty, we're getting up to that total response number. That looks pretty good. Oh, you guys really think it's A. Okay, well, take a look. I'm going to go back to my share. I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I really wonder, oh my goodness, what happened? I thought A was going to take it. So wait a minute, what? Zero? So I go to just one page and I bounce. Zero seconds are recorded. So here's what's happening. I don't know how many of you ran track or cross-country, but let's say with track in high school or college. Imagine there's a coach and that coach is Google Analytics extending there with the timer. You set off around a quarter-mile track and you're running and you're running and the coach is like, all right, it's been one minute, it's been two minutes. But then you get halfway around that track and you're like, you know, I hate running actually. I'm going to the bar. And you go to the bar and you never come back. And so Google Analytics is like, well, they never ran that lap. They never came back. I don't know how much time has passed. So it's not until another action, that's another page view, or another sort of clip that Google can record, not until another one of those things happens until that's the way that you get time recorded. So another action has to happen. So just one page in the bounce doesn't count. So this is incredibly important when we're using average session duration. This is one of the main things that you get when you log into the Google Analytics dashboard. You're getting an average session duration. Now down here in the orange is when I filter out, and I use this segment, and I filter out, and I only look at people that are non-bounce, people that didn't bounce and went to another page. And you see this wild difference. This wild difference almost more than 4x the amount of average time. So one of the things that you're reporting about your site, and this is why we're spending time on it and understanding what people are doing, is actually look at the true cost here because it's averaging in those zeros in the top. So it's averaging in all the zero amounts of time and it's averaging against that form and it actually knows. So this is a very common mistake that you use. You know, we want to build that non-bounce view of the session average duration, or at least note that our average session duration is artificially low when we're looking at these analytics outside of the box. So one more thing here, though. Averages are misleading because I'm talking about average session duration, so we're assuming everyone that goes to the website is spending 4 minutes and 49 seconds. They can also hurt kids. Averages can hurt kids. Trust me, not. It's when we told to rely on average session duration. So if we carry this another step deeper, we can actually look at and get a distribution of all of the average sessions, but the individual sessions, based on zero to 10 seconds, up to 30 seconds, 31 to 60 seconds, and get a full view of this nice little curve, noting that we have to get rid of this view and look at non-bounce sessions. So when we filter out, we get a true view and distribution of how, on average, long are people spending on our site. And we get an idea of what our power law looks like, where the value of our curve is with regard to usage in this case. You can kind of see it bellying between this 180 and 600 seconds in that period of time. Super interesting to understand how your audience is using it. This down here is a note in our navigation audience. So within the audience section of analytics, you can see the behavior and then engagement is where you can find this audience behavior engagement. Again, you'll get these slides and you can look at it. Alrighty, quiz time. I love these quizzes because it makes sure I know you're paying attention. M&M time, misleading metric session duration quiz. A user visits nonprofit.org on page, spends three minutes scrolling through one page, then two minutes on the next page, and then leaves the site. How long does GA record the session duration? A, five minutes. B, three minutes. C, zero. Okay, let's see. I almost gave away the answer. Let's go to the poll. So we're thinking about someone who comes to the homepage spending three minutes. Then we move to second page. What do we think? Is it additional or not? So if we can't pull to the poll, it's totally fine. We can answer in the chat. So we've got some chat going on. We've got a lot of B's. Seems like a couple people are like, yeah, obviously A. No choice of showing. Yeah, now we're doing the chat room. We're going to old school. Okay, we're getting paid here. A little bit of B. It seems like A and B. A and B is at E. We're not tricking anybody with that zero minutes again. B seems to be pulling away. Someone just said five. All right. A little bit of A. So the real question is, what happens when we get to that last page? And drum roll. The true answer is B is correct. Ah, boy. What happened? I thought we understood what was going on. So in the same way, we can follow along when we bounce off a page. Google liked that coach with a stopwatch. And in this case, we ran the first lap. We came around and we'll measure that three minutes. Great. Run one more lap. And you're running and running, but then you exit. So Google has no more interaction with you. You leave. So this two minutes, basically, it's not counted. In this case, three minutes ends up being our number. All right. And I don't know if you're thinking, but the zero does not get averaged in this case for the exit. All right. So, you know, the misleading metrics, session duration. So there's problems here that, you know, we just need to understand when we go into our metrics. So some of these metrics underestimate the true session duration and always remember those bounce sessions have a duration. Duration is zero. Without any sort of advanced configuration, there are ways of setting actual timers and advanced configured. Some of the things we do for some of our clients are said, sometimes a 15-second timer that will automatically track whether or not the user is still active. Some of the solutions also, besides that, are looking at non-mouse visitors, as we said, with segmented, and then looking at what really matters, which is goal tracking, which we'll be moving toward. Our next misleading metric, an excuse for me to put another cat on the screen, is the internal traffic can inflate sessions. So I'm going to that, especially if you have a smaller organization with less traffic that the people inside of your organization might be the number one user of your website. Well, that's fine, but if they represent like half of your traffic, that's a huge problem, because you're not really understanding how external people use your site. So one of the things you can do here is set up a filter. What we want to do is create a filter that filters out our internal IP. So we can tell what the call is coming from inside the house. We go find our IP, and inside of that admin section, we create these filters that exclude traffic from the internal IP address. We can also do things like exclude traffic from death sites or other sites that you know that are throwing off your overall true metrics of what's going on. You know, this is a tough thing for some people because they're like, oh, well, it's going to decrease our total number of users, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. What you can do is create a backup of your account so that you have one just true account of everyone who's going to the site, and then one that has the filters on it, something that we love to do, always make sure you have that backup. But then you're looking at the true activity of your site instead of, you know, playing games with your heart and analytics. What else can Google Analytics track? I've been talking about goals and events. So instead of goals, you know, some more ideas for you, newsletter, sign-outs, donations, we can create sales tunnels if there are people cooking through multiple pages to buy something to check out. We can do time goals. So anytime somebody spent more than five minutes, we can set up this goal to actually trigger. Pretty much think about it as any click on the site, literally any click anywhere on the site, there is a way to set up a goal for that. Events, similarly, is a, think of it as like a meta goal, but something that doesn't go as intensely as goals in terms of tracking. It is also a counter for any manner of things. Things that we like to set up are outbound referrals, things like scroll depth, video interaction, so if someone's playing a video, maybe it's not like, yay, goal, celebrate, but we just want to know or social shares. Events can be configured. One that I really love here is actually the outbound referrals. So we can tell, Note this is using Google Tag Manager. We're not getting into that, but we will provide resources to explain how to use Google Tag Manager to set up advanced configuration. But we can find out where do people go when they click to leave our site. And this is actually looking at Whole Whales traffic. And we're sharing here, when somebody clicks to leave, so for example, when somebody clicks this mail to let's talk at Whole Whales, that's actually somebody clicking to contact us. That may actually be a goal that we can set up. Or sometimes we just want to know how many people are clicking to go and leave and read something that we ranted about on Huffington Post. And we can get all this information plus the page where it happens we're getting the action and where it happens. So on the outpage I have a link to Huffington Post that 34 people went to in this timeframe. Now it's up to me whether or not I want to change that and be like, oh gosh, I don't want to be linking to that. Or on the Giving Tuesday join, perfect, I want to be linking to that, but oh, maybe I'm linking from the right page. We can get all kinds of information about where people are leaving us from. So that's probably my favorite event. Although I should never have been a favorite event, it makes the others jealous. I have no favorite events. Let's move on to an example. Power poetry. I love these guys. They're super open with their data with us and they'll let us use it. Power poetry.org. Those guys are crushing it. All right. Question. Which social network sends better traffic to our website? Feel free as you have ideas in the top tier to talk us into the chat. But which social network sends better? That's the key word traffic to our site. When we think about better, we're not looking for a total volume necessarily. We're looking for quality. And quality metrics are actually around the behavior section. So in that behavior section, I just zoomed in here. In the behavior section, this is where I get bounce rate, which is an indication of do people find what they're looking for when they come to our site. We also get things like pages per session, which is just overall derivation here of the higher the number of pages per session. Just means they look at more pages during the given session. I mean during breakfast, do eight, ten things as opposed to two things. Okay. Bounce rate. Let's compare them. Facebook versus Twitter. Here we go. Facebook, 63% bounce rate versus 62%. Pretty darn close. Twitter's a little better. I'm on a lower bounce rate. Okay. Pages per session. 3.05, 3.02. Twitter, again, a little bit better on pages per session, spending a little bit more time, but really not truly that significant. Over here, we have average session duration. Two minutes, 50 seconds. Two minutes, 53 seconds for Twitter. So 253 for Twitter. Again, spending more time. So what are we thinking at this point? Are we thinking Facebook is sending better traffic or Twitter's sending better traffic? We're getting some, anybody, anyone's putting in? Let me just take a look if we can type that in. Facebook has more users. Yeah, Facebook has more users, but again, the question is not quality, but quality. All right, we have Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter. Is this better? Where can I find that for? I don't know. All right, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Oh, yeah. Twitter seems like it's behavioral. Oh, Andrew. Andrew, you're calling up extra information. Exactly. So Andrew's pointing us to this extra area where we have conversions, goals that are set up. And so we actually continue moving to the right. We have users, which are number one, I showed you on Power Poetry, new teams signing up on the site, which is The Holy Grail. Who cares about how much time you're spending on the site if you're not signing up? And this is a crazy thing. You see that it's more than 2X. It's more than 2X for Facebook here, which is nuts, which means we have to be definitely focusing on Facebook and our energy here. 1.89% of the people that come from Facebook are converting, which is fantastic versus 0.78, which leads to a total number of 309 versus 35. So if we're going to create more time for our team, it's very clearly Facebook. It's not even a question. We can only get this information though if we have goals set up. Got to say that again, out of the box, none of this happens. We have to tell the world what we want to happen, what those predictive outputs are. So the more people that sign up, the more teams that become users on Power Poetry, the better chance we have a long-term outcome of improved literacy for this target audience. We want to do more of what works upstream and measure it and then put it into practice. So hopefully that makes sense for people. I want to dig in a little deeper here though. For assisted conversions, this is a heady topic, but it's important. What if people don't convert on that first visit? So goals are basically saying, all right, I immediately came from Facebook and I converted. But what if I went from Facebook, but then I got bored with a poem left and I came back in a month, let's say. And I was like, oh yeah, I have that poem. I have to write under that site and create that poem. I don't know how many of you know this famous bolster, Michael Jordan. One of his most impressive stats, actually it was not the total number of baskets in, but the number of assists. The average point total for everyone else on the court went up when he was on the court. He drew the defense and it was awesome at passing. So in this metaphor, I want you to think of Michael Jordan as a Twitter or a Facebook. Where that first interaction may be that, oh cool, we saw some cool thing you posted on Facebook, went to the website, interacted with something, and then the person came back, let's say two weeks later. Well remember how I showed you how those cookies last for a very long time? We can tell in that process, somebody who was initially introduced or along the way was influenced by a click from Facebook or Twitter. If they were influenced by that, if they eventually converted, this is huge. This is some of the coolest stuff coming out right now. You find this in the conversion section and in the assisted conversion section under the multi-channel fundals. There's tons of stuff to click on over here but this is one of my favorite. Looking at this, you can then see how powerful this becomes because we have overlapping interactions. We're not making this last click assumption. This crazy idea that it's one and done, one interaction and someone's going to convert, otherwise we lose them. This is the whole idea behind the remarketing effort that you can see across the board. Hey, this is why, sorry, this is actually why those shoes chase you around the internet, especially dangerous during the holidays. In this view, I'm clicking at the multi-channel funnel, assisted conversions, and I'm clicking on direct, so these are people that directly go to the website by typing it in, organic search, so they're typing something like, how to write slant poetry, and then finally social network. And you see the overlap. How many interactions ultimately overlays for the goals we're tracking. And you can actually then go down and see the total number of assisted conversions. And I like showing this because we're talking about social media because social media often has this big overlap with the other work that you do. And it can be discounted by the social media teams because you're just looking at that, well, wait a minute, how many donations did we get directly from that? Well, we're not saying very many. Let's get rid of social media. It's actually not that correct. You want to be looking at the full picture. Did social media, like Michael Jordan, create a whole bunch of assists? Something to consider. Again, you might have goals set up. Okay. More and more examples. I love these examples. So power poetry again, the example is demo conversion. So with regard to demographics, I shortened it there, demographic conversions in the universal analytics. We can ask questions. Remember, going around that wheel, gather, ask questions, and then analyze. So the asking questions, do millennials like this? Are we appealing to the under generation or are we ARP friendly? For which audience are we applying appealing to? We can actually look and get by age range. Total sessions, but also look at behavioral metrics, the behavioral metrics behind it. And so you can get total bounce rate. And so in this case, hopefully you remember, higher low, which is good. Spoiler, low bounce rate is better. So let's say we have a 55 plus year old coming to the website, powerpoetry.org, site designed for teens, poetry, slam poetry. I'm not that worried. But the fact that 40%, 50% of people are bouncing. That's fine. I'd be more worried if we were losing the teen audience. Just to make it simpler, we can look at the goal conversion rate. Because ultimately, remember what matters to me is, at the end of the day, are they converting to become new poets? Are they creating new poems? So I can look at overall goal conversion rate, what really matters, and understand if we have a problem. So in this case, I'm totally happy with this. This makes sense. This is the largest teen poetry platform on the internet, and we have the rates to prove it. 39% versus the 27, 34, and he's sort of tapering off, which is interesting. There's a little belly here where you get this 45 to 54, and that's actually the teachers. So we have this extra little dip here where we maybe want to make sure that we're appealing to teachers in this range a bit more. This is wildly helpful for understanding about how maybe you're telling your stories to people. Because you can look at bounce rate, and you can look at other session duration metrics based on age. This is huge, because you can finally answer it instead of putting somebody in a... doing a case study of 10 people and be like, do you like this site or not? What is your age range? You have the information if you've set it up properly. Also, just to note, when you're looking at demographics, you do need a critical mass of traffic in order to get it. You can see we're dealing with a really great dataset from our poetry that's dealing with about 200,000 users per month. So it's a large set. I've already talked about significant... I've seen it start to get useful once you kick over about 1,000, 5,000 people a month below that. You're just dealing with maybe too small a number that's being thrown off. So it's always important to look at your sample size and get an idea of that. Okay, next question. So we have one of our clients, the National Stroke Association. You guys are awesome, stroke.org, leading the way in understanding strokes and how to deal with them. We have how many... Here are the questions, right? Gather, ask questions, analyze. We have the question, how many new subscribers are we getting? And how can we increase that, which is the inevitable next question? So they have subscribers that are awesome, Stroke Magazine, the Stroke Smart Magazine. So we have source and medium. We have Google CPC, which means cost per click, CPC, which is the advertising. So Google AdWords, remember we're connecting that. Google AdWords is actually in here. Google Organics, so people searching online. Direct people that come directly there. Some of these are referred internally and then a good old thing doing its best to be relevant. But, you know, sending in organic traffic nonetheless. We have the goal completions over here. And we can actually see that, oh gosh, 23% of all of our conversions for this are coming from Google CPC. And we can dig into that and say, okay, where are they going? How are they getting there? Can we optimize that page more? But we can see how Google AdWords, and in particular, we're able to leverage the Google AdWords grant, which I have to say is awesome. It is free for nonprofits. Google.com slash nonprofits. The Google AdWords grant gives you $10,000 of in-kind, you don't have to pay for it, in-kind money per month to spend on web traffic. And then you can send it to things like newsletter or subscriptions or magazine subscriptions in that case. So we find this in the conversions, goals, overview section. But let's say I want to dig into more of that CPC. So we found the interesting things. Okay, sure, paid traffic is hashtag winning at the top of this. But what is actually going on inside of that advertising campaign? Because we're using a bunch of different keywords and things to drive that traffic. So it's not just one ad and one keyword. It's a whole bunch of different keywords that we're using. So we need to dig a little deeper. And this is the great thing about it. I want to keep clicking, going deeper, finding the answer that we are requiring. So really, sure, CPC is driving a bunch of stuff. But which keywords are driving the most conversions? In this case, the sign-ups for the Stroke Smart Magazine. So which ones are doing this? And we can look in and we get this total free magazine. We have warning signs of Stroke Stroke, free magazine subscription. And we understand that, oh my gosh, it's actually the free magazine subscription that is crushing, that is crushing the general free magazine. So now, we can take this back into the advertising side and say, actually, let's make sure we're maxing out on that keyword. Or let's make sure we're using that relevant keyword more often in our content. Maybe taking that into our SEO or search engine optimization on our content marketing. There's tons of information that you can then find by just looking at the performance of these pages. Again, you get a different view when we're saying which is driving the most conversions. We're looking immediately toward conversions. And I'm sad because you can't really tell 96% versus 91%. They're true difference. And this is crazy, the true difference when you understand the conversions coming from just the addition of one word subscription. Cool stuff. So the action here, because we have to go, gather, ask questions, analyze. We have our insight. The action is tell the marketing team to pursue these for higher quality traffic. And so we do. So what I'm getting at here, and if you've seen this movie or read the book, is the idea of just be breadth hit. No, just find your impact, saver metrics. And the idea of money ball is fantastic. You're talking about the Oakland Aids, a team that barely has the budget to compete against the New York Yankees. They're literally at the very, very bottom in terms of the total amount they can spend. So instead of looking at all these sort of vanity or glamour metrics without a player, they look at what actually drives toward their outcome, which is winning games. And it turns out it's not, you know, average batting percentage or slugging percentage. It's on base percentage. How often do you get on that base? I don't care if you walk there. If you're an expert in getting hit by the ball, go up there and get on base, and we will win over time. And they found very valuable players that were undervalued for the outcome. So you want to really dig in and understand your organization's metrics as well as money ball is able to. Okay. Moving on, time to act. So we're going around our circle, gather, act, analyze. The next piece here is using dashboards. So we actually have created, now I guess the top nonprofit dashboard download starter pack. And this is something free that you can find inside of your menu when you log into Google Analytics and you're in your account. You go to dashboards, you go to new dashboard, and then you will see import from gallery. You'll find this to be searched for whole whale or nonprofit dashboard. We'll pop up and we'll be able to, be able to download a whole bunch of automatic dashboards right into your account. So we're going to give you AdWords Performance Dashboards, Demographic Dashboards, Executive Dashboards, my personal favorite. But hold on. What is dashboard? So what you're looking at here is an example of the Executive Dashboard. When you immediately log into Google Analytics you end up in this sort of audience overview section which kind of just throws a bunch of metrics at you and isn't necessarily giving you the information that is critical to your organization. So inside of a dashboard think of it as kind of getting a bunch of little windows into what matters most for your organization. And so in here what we've done is in the time range, time frame here is October and November. In this time frame, we have sessions. We've got users as total numbers, average session duration, bounce rate, overall website goal. So a big number there. We have our event flow fluctuation of what's going on with the practice sessions and average session duration so we can see if there's any peaks and valleys. Spoiler, everybody has got sort of the valley during the weekend because fewer people go on the internet. How do people get on our site? So we like framing it in the form of a question. We get the breakdowns of sessions and bounce rate getting a top level view. You can then set this up to actually send an email to you. We love doing this. And this is what makes it a big more action. We can set up this email so that it will then send to, hopefully, someone who cares at your organization. So we're sending this to someone who cares at your organization by clicking on that email button. And look here, we can send it weekly, oh boy, every Monday waking us up in the morning. This is one of the things we love doing once we've identified what matters. We're building this feedback loop. That's what really impacts in terms of the action side. If we ignore Google Analytics, and we only look at it, say, quarterly or even worse, annually, it's not really influencing our behavior. The power of this is saying, let's say we've got a content team. Let's say we have a social media team. Let's say we have the executive team. If we're able to, say, every single month send one of these dashboards to them. It literally shows up in their email attached. If you can send this to them, you can only get a quick snapshot of what's going on online, which is becoming increasingly important because that's how most of our audience is interacting with us. So this is a powerful tool. I want to make sure we understand it. We're first getting our download from wholewell.com slash Google. We're going to download that dashboard because we can automatically install it in our account, which is set up, pulling that into our account. And then you can set it up with that email. And then choosing the people who are getting it. You can send different reports to different people based on the departments. So we try to build it out that way. Very, very powerful. And this is where we kind of go from the Analyze and Insight area to action by building the behavioral loop. Gather, ask questions, analyze insights. Act and learn. By building that feedback loop, we're able to really emphasize the fact that we're looking at numbers that change us. All right, more questions. Here's a good one. Are mobile users happy? Sure, maybe we made the site mobile friendly or maybe we're planning on doing that eventually. So here's the problem. We can actually look inside and see that the desktop mobile tablet traffic, but then we can look at the bounce rate based on the device. And we can see that it's more than 10%, which is a warning factor to us. It's actually 17% higher when we're looking at mobile versus desktop. Yikes, that's not good. Especially when you look at the fact that mobile, in this particular case, is taking up 32% of the overall traffic. So not very good. So what we do with this information once we've found out that we actually have a mobile user problem. So we know that something on the mobile side is broken. The insight is the mobile experience is lackluster, maybe people are less engaged, less likely to interact with the way we want them to. So we're solution, we have to talk to our developers, our QA team, to discuss further mobile testing and team improvements. But what if they say, man, it's fine, we're mobile responses, there's no problem. I've had this discussion, I've been on both sides of this discussion actually. So my response actually is to go even deeper. So we were just in the mobile overview, but we can actually look at the type of device because Google's recording this on average for all of our sessions. We can look at the type of device and get into the site and get the good old behavior of bounce rate. Remember, the higher the bounce rate means that something went wrong, they're not necessarily liking us. And in this case, we can say, you know, it looks like you guys are actually using Apple and HTC phones to test the mobile experience, but people on Samsung hate our stuff. So there may be an issue on that. So you can give that to the QA team, so they don't have to test a billion devices. They can go grab that Samsung phone and understand what's going on. And once they find that information, well, they can, you know, maybe go off the space on it and either get rid of the device or fix it. So that's an example of moving from that, asking the questions, gathering information, finding the insight, drilling down, and helping indicate the dev team find the answer. Next up. So next up we have broken funnels. Inside of conversions on the left side, we have a multi-step process. It's not just one click. There's actually a form that's three-paged long. I mean, why you have a three-page long form? I don't know, but people have them, especially if we're talking about shopping. So let's say in this case, we got home, why join page, then subscribe page, and then the registration success page. We can track that and actually tell where there's drop-off. And I don't know if you're seeing what I'm seeing, but we have a huge drop-off on the home screen. The why join, you know, it's, okay, you know, we send on 67%, that's reasonable. But then we have to drop and subscribe. Look at that. Only 25% of people go on after they already clicked on something on the why join. There might be a problem. And this is the power of understanding and building these funnels. We can now go in and fix that page and understand where in the funnel we're having a problem. Maybe it's a form that has got 50 fields. And somebody said, oh, it's fine. People fill out all the fields because they care. Maybe. But maybe not. So maybe the page actually looks like this. And maybe the home page needed improvement. We needed improvement. And so there are opportunities now of like, say, okay, we admit we have got a problem because this page is actually built in the 90s. So how do we improve? You know, how do we improve? Do you remember where we were? We have a terrible home page. But in this practical case, we have a page that we want to improve. And in this case, we use the tool called Optimizely to figure out an A, B, and F. And my question to you is, what is your good instinct here of which one performs better, page A or page B? Again, the goal being, how do we get more people to convert? How do we get more people to convert to signing up? So with the little chat window, A or B, what do you think? What do you think? So in this case, maybe you figured that, oh, okay. What should be some A and you're like, nice. I wonder though how much better do you think it will be when we're looking at it? Do you think it will be 10% better, twice as better? In this case, B actually won in this A, B test using Optimizely. It won by 25%, which is huge. Think about the impact to the long-term conversion of this page. Like month over month, year over year, it's that much better than converting at an increase of 25%. One in four people. That's fantastic. It's just some small pages, some small page changes can lead to these big results. If you have the time to do it and you have enough people going to that page, it's pretty amazing. So I want to go to this idea that numbers are people too. And in numbers are people too, when we're getting people to act, how do we talk about numbers internally? I'm going to tell three different ways of saying one is bad about newsletter signups. There were 315 newsletter signups during the month of September, an average of 10.5 per day. Okay, that's actually correct. A different way of putting it. In September, 10.5 people per day told us they care about the cause, our cause, and want to hear more about our work. It's just a different way of framing, but we're using the actual output. Finally, during September, 315 people signed up to hear more from us. This should lead to 31 new donors in the next six months. So, thinking about what the predictive outputs are and saying, let's go back to what those Google Analytics goals are, and not forgetting that those are actual people. And so when we have 315 people sign up for, let's say, a newsletter or an alert list, those are people saying, you know what, I want to hear from you again, which is huge in this day and age, because the last thing I need is another freaking email. Yes, if I'm emotionally moved, if I'm emotionally moved by an organization or a cause, I'm going to sign up, which means I'm starting that handshake, relationship, which for some organizations, if you're driving toward donors, is able to predict a model where you could say in the next six to nine months, if we are able to nurture that lead, we're going to lead to about a conversion of potentially 10% of those people who will give some amount of money. And we just went through that crazy day of Giving Tuesday. And one of the things that kind of make me the saddest is when an organization who has no manner of audience and hasn't been building a list of people, suddenly creates a Giving Tuesday page and expects the random internet to give money. That doesn't work, spoiler alert. As much as you hope it will or you'll be that, hey, we got the story, we're on the front page of Reddit, and we got a whole bunch of donations. For the 99% of us, that doesn't happen. What does happen is we build a list of people that care. Over time, we talk to them, we tell them our story, and then we're able to convert them into a list of people that care. And that's what we do on that day. But if you backtrack, if we can improve things like the conversion rate and the sources of traffic that are driving those newsletter signups, you can kind of see what I'm talking about, the predictive metrics and the importance of driving these earlier on in the process. Numbers are people too, but you're a member. So here's our gather, ask questions, analyze, insight, act. I'm really trying to drill it down to eventually ask the questions and don't necessarily make it to the act. So here are some things we didn't fully cover as much as I would have loved to, but here are links to go chase them down. I'm also looking forward to answering a bunch of your questions. I tried to weave enough time so that we can really dig into areas of interest. So assistant conversions, we have resources there. Google Tag Manager, we literally just launched a video that as they walked through Google Tag Manager, free tool that is like an add-on for Google Analytics. And campaign tagging, where we're able to actually use custom URLs that we create to pass in information to tell Google different things so that we can track when, let's say, we have a special URL for a banner or a PSA or something like that and we want to track it uniquely, that is also possible. So those are available on our site. I want to move to QA and make sure that I answer things to potentially do some live walkthroughs. So I'll be looking, I guess, to the chat room to see what kind of questions there are bubbling up. So we have five questions that I'd love to see what we have. Well, we'll be looking for questions. So I'm going to go back and just leave it off to the panel. Hi, George. Yes. We do have quite a few questions. A couple of them are if someone leaves a page open for days, how is that recorded? So in the case that, let's say somebody goes to one, you know, one page of your website and just leaves it open for days and has a complete disregard for their computer and energy whatsoever, basically that session cookie runs out. And so when you come back after a half hour, it's like, oh, look, here's a new user. Great. Let's count them as a, sorry, here's a new session. Let's count them as a new session. So it's kind of like that timer. If you're not clicking on anything on that website, it's basically done after that 30-minute timer is over. Great. Thank you. A lot of folks have questions about cookies and how they work. Could you address that? Yeah. You know, you can go really, really far into it, but ultimately, every browser and device that you're using has got cookies in it. And so when you go to New York Times, you're able to log in immediately without getting to go in there. There's a cookie that is automatically saved in your browser that allows you to do that. And so cookies are just like a way of saving these temporary files on the machines that you're on. It also has information that can be read. And so when we're talking about, you know, like user's privacy and elements like that, we're just leaking data all over the place. And that's how remarketing works as well. But think of it as these tiny little files are saved in your browser device. I know I'm oversimplifying this, but these tiny little files are always being stored for a different amount of time, depending on how long they last. I already told you that the ones that Google Analytics can last for two years and that device. Now, of course, if you're doing anonymous browsing or using like a Tor browser, if you're blocking that sort of information, of course you're not getting that. And that's a lot of time where you see actually not set show up in your data because that information has been blocked. I can go further, but I don't really want to go too far into this. Great. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about bounce rates and setting optimal bounce rates? A little bit more about that? Okay. So the optimal rate for a bounce rate is drumroll. It depends. I know frustrating answer. So bounce rate, what we're talking about is somebody comes to one page and immediately leaves. But let's say, for instance, that page is the donate page. I was just talking about giving Tuesday. And let's say on your giving Tuesday page, you're using maybe Network for Good and somebody has to click to go off of your site to Network for Good and you don't have any other else tracking on it. If you have a 99% bounce rate and everyone's going to that donate on Network for Good for You, you win. That's awesome. So context is king when we're talking about this. Now that said, optimal bounce rates are not just garbage for an entire site. What we care about is the context. So let's say the home page, which is the most common set we're talking about. Optimal page bounce rates, I hope to see for an average nonprofit site is probably in the range of that, sort of 40 to 60%, just to be broad spectrum without ending there. 40 to 60%, depending on how that page is designed and in that range. It's going too much higher. You're like, oh, okay. The better way to do it is actually to look at and I'll try to do a little live to show you what I'm looking for when I do this. It's actually to look at a timeframe. And so when I look at timeframe, so here is, for example, a live page, and I hope this is showing up for everyone. But I can look at, is this showing up, Julie? Great. So what I was just saying, hypothetically, what I would do is I'm going to go to my overview of behavior, and then I can look at different pages. So in this case, I'm going to look at all pages of my site and then behavior, all pages. I'll care about the home page. And what I want to find to do is baseline. What is my baseline bounce rate for the home page? When you go in here, hopefully you can see that this little flash here is the home page, that's the root domain that's coming up. And okay, my bounce rate for this given period of time is 22%. But I can ask the question, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, I don't know. Let me compare it to the past month. So I cook this compared to the past period. Now suddenly I have a comparison. Now this is big because now I can compare it to myself and work toward improvement rather than taking some random thing that George said during one webinar and that applies to everything. So here you go. You can see that October to November that this bounce rate has actually gotten better. It's improved by 8%. Oh, that's great. Actually, no, it's gotten worse. It's not good. Again, we want a lower number. We want a lower number for that. Okay, hopefully that helps. Let me increase my size. Okay. Any other questions? Thanks. Could you address the difference between inbound and outbound referrals? Inbound and outbound referrals. Okay. So when we're talking about inbound, we're talking about the different ways that people come to our website. And I'm doing a live walkthrough and I'm going to look at audience, acquisition behavior. So I'm going to go with this. Acquisition. Where people are coming from because we're talking about inbound. Where are people coming in from? I'm going to go through my source mediums, which is going to break down where people are coming from. So my inbound traffic, giving me the source medium, I'm actually going to take off my comparison so I can make it a simpler view for us. I'm going to turn it off and get applied. Thanks, power poetry, for letting us use these data. Okay. So here's the question. Here's my inbound and here's what they're doing. So I get awesome information like, oh, here's m.facebook, mobile Facebook traffic coming into the site. Here's how much, here's how good the traffic is when I'm looking at that behavior. And then I can also play with conversion rates when I want to. Here's Facebook proper, so no m.facebook proper sending in traffic to the website. I can tell how well that's performing as well. So that's the inbound. Now outbound is a little bit more difficult than customization. It is possible, like I said, to do outbound URL tracking. And in this case, I have it set up for, yes, I do have it set up for power poetry. So I can look at top events. So I've set up an event that anytime, at least if somebody's left the site because they clicked on something. Remember, they clicked on some URL, and I'll show you how well before, they clicked on something to leave. I can actually see this in outbound links because we're tracking and saving that information. So we're holding onto that information for, you know, we're holding onto that user for a couple seconds to record what the URL they're leaving and the page that they left from, and just saving that as an event, which can be super helpful. And I'm going into event label. Again, this is not outside the box. This takes configuration, but I love doing this kind of thing. So we get to see, oh great, where are they going? So people go into the blog, someone's going to Spark Notes, this person's going to Twitter, this person's going to Tumblr, and this is saving where people are leaving from. So that's inbound and outbound much, much, much better for inbound. Great. Thank you. I have a couple of questions about how to tell if your site has Google Analytics. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. So we have, we've got extra fun things on our, on our sort of browsers that let us tell for the like little Google Analytics jobbys, the debug things. But for most of you, what you're going to need to do is look at a source. So for viewing the source of any page, we go here and we do the, sorry, I'll go, page source, new page source. So then we're in page source. And here's a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo. But remember what I was talking about so we can go look for the general UA code? I know this is super geeky and techy, but there you go. I found the UA code and here's the UA number for Power Poetry. I can do the same thing for TechSoup. I can also tell other things about their tracking library. So in this case, here's my analytics.js. So we're using the new library. Yay. So that's the, that's the quick answer. We can check TechSoup.org. Thank you. Go ahead. Yes. A lot of folks have had questions about the collection of demographics. Besides just age and gender, what other demographics are collected? So age and gender are my two favorites. Remember, these are aggregated metrics. All of these are technically aggregated metrics. And so under audience demographics, the other information that we get besides age and gender is also interest. So it's affinity categories. This is based on marketing. I don't love these because everyone ends up being like, oh, movie lovers love our site. I'm like, okay. Movie lovers, TV lovers. So these are general tags and groupings. But you know, honestly, results may vary. There may be a particular interest of your nonprofit. And then you're able to define an affiliate group, a look-alike audience that you can then potentially design. Oh, shutter bugs. So interesting. Look, we've got shutter bugs here. So people that love taking photos and potentially make a partnership with a shutter fly or something like that. Actually, we have a high amount of overlap audience here. So fun stuff there. Again, take it with a grain of salt because these are aggregated metrics based on cookies. But in aggregate, you can find some interesting things depending on what you're looking for. Other categories, you know, here you get people that are interested in jobs, education, universities, books, literature, poetry, not surprising. Ooh, interesting science and mathematics. Yep, so that's where you find it. Once demographics are enabled. Thank you. And I think we have time for one or two more questions. Someone asked a question about Google AdWords and how you use them. Yeah, so actually I'm going to let Julie speak about this topic because she's been quiet and doing all the work on the side. Julie, what are Google AdWords for nonprofits? Hi, everyone. Google AdWords are the little ads that show up at the top of your search results when you use a browser or a search engine like Google. So you might have seen them before. And Google has a really great program called the Google AdWords Grant. And it allows nonprofits to spend up to $10,000 a month in free advertising on its platform. So this is an awesome resource. If you don't know about it, we definitely encourage you to check out the resources on our site or TechSoup has some resources there too. We actually gave a webinar on this topic a few months ago. And just check if you qualify. Not every nonprofit will qualify for this grant, but if you do, it's a super easy application to fill out and it can be a really great resource for driving traffic to your website. Yeah, it all comes from google.com. That's nonprofits where you sign up and you're able to then, once you look at their products, they have apps so they can run all your e-mail, the ad grants that they're called. There's a YouTube nonprofit. So once you create an account and you sign up for the Google nonprofits, you can get into all the services they offer. And of course, TechSoup has got an awesome webinar that we did with them on this. Thanks. One other question was about setting the goals. So just more about setting the goals again. Some folks I think are looking for some advice on how to do that. So we really can post some links inside of the chat for our how-to on creating goals. We also have videos on doing this. So fundamentally, we're going into the admin section. This is where all the configuration happens. If I want my tracking info, here's where I get my code. I'm going to go back. I'm going to power poetry, goals. So over on the right. And here's where I can create new goals. Goals, again, is going to give you the option of doing different options here. I can set it as a destination path, which is really what I talked about a lot. I'm going to even give you an example. So let's say it's a donate thank you page. So I'll say the donate thank you page. This is the page that someone only gets to after they have potentially donated through something and they end up back on your site on the slash thank you. So I'll go here. So destination goals equals to, I'll say, and this is the page that must, must be this, obviously, on your site. Thanks for giving. I'm not actually going to create this, but I can save and then suddenly it's going to track. As a goal, anytime someone gets to, thanks for giving. If I want to do a funnel, I can say, if somebody went to the home page and then add another step to see if there's a goal model. For advanced configuration, there's tons of different options. So it's super flexible. The other big one is that sort of time set, but that's the beginning of it. And we'll post that resource so you can spend more time playing around with that. Great. Thank you. I think we'll be able to send all of these links and some of the data that you've shared with us in the FAQs as a post email. So we'll be able to give everyone access to that information. Thank you. I guess that is our final question. Our no more questions. I think we've addressed the majority of the questions. A few others we will be able to answer in our FAQs. And we can forward those on to you to respond to after the presentation. Cool. The funnel page, I'd love to assist you. Go back to one slide there. Here's just the overall links that will help you get to where you're going. We have podcasts. We have an online course, actually, for how to manage the AdWords that you can take for your video training. And of course, the general resources that we've been sharing. Thanks so much for having us, though. I really appreciate the fact that 293 of you officially survived the entire time. So hopefully there's something for you to run back and actually execute at work. I truly believe in this stuff. I believe that if you are able to measure what matters, you can do more of what works and do great work. Thanks for being a partner. Thank you so much, George. It's obvious you have got a wealth of experience. I do want to take a couple of minutes now to gather some data from the folks that are still on the line. If you could take a moment and chat one thing that you're going to share with a co-worker or something that you learned. I know we all learned a lot. Being more vigilant with analytics. And for some of you, this is a great introduction to Google Analytics. The bounce rate was also something that a lot of folks learned about. Great. So a couple of other things. Let's go ahead and take a look at some of our upcoming webinars and events. Next week we have our Adobe Photoshop for Beginners, which will be a webinar for the basics of Photoshop for those folks who have little to no experience in Photoshop. And then on the 16th we have 15 ways to improve your library's Facebook page. Your opinion does matter to us. Immediately following this webinar you're going to receive a survey. Help us to improve what we do and help our webinars. This is our job. Our job is to give you the tools and training you need to serve your customers and achieve your organization's mission. Thank you for your feedback. Again, thanks to George and Julie from WholeWail and also a special thanks to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk. And a shout out to our back-end folks, Allie and Ariel for also queuing up and answering questions. Thank you everyone. Have a great week.