 Hello everyone, welcome. My name is Chris Tuttle. I will be your presenter today. We are looking forward to talking about Google Analytics and measuring our online reach and how we can utilize that data and information to get more visitors to our website. I am an ideal wear expert trainer. I have been working actually for ideal wear for about three years now delivering trainings both in person and online. I've worked in the non-profit space for my entire 20-year career working within and now consulting for nonprofits on a variety of digital engagement strategies. I started out as a community organizer and tech geek and have since gone on to work for some software companies doing internet solutions for different non-profit organizations before moving on to my own consulting firm a few years ago. So I still today work with state, regional, and global non-profits, foundations, and other organizations still in the field doing this work while also talking and training about it. So today we are going to talk about web analytics. It looks like you are already getting a preview. I am somewhat assuming everyone here is using web analytics. So we will talk about how do we get started with Google Analytics, what exactly analytics can collect. We are going to focus on Google Analytics as our web analytics platform today, but the topics and strategies we are talking about with Google Analytics applies basically mostly to all web analytics software should you be using a different system. But Google Analytics has kind of become the go-to system for web analytics. So we will talk about that data, the body of data that exists in Google Analytics and what we can learn from that information, how we can analyze that data. So we are not just looking at numbers, but we are actually looking at patterns and we are looking at historical references to figure out what those numbers mean and how we can easily maintain metrics so that we are not only looking at them every once in a while or when we need to know something but that we are actually continually looking and utilizing those metrics to improve our work. So what are web analytics? And they are simply metrics associated with our web properties that allow us to better understand who is using our website, how they are using it, and what they are using it for, what they are getting out of it. Web analytics are not perfect in that there is a variety of technical issues that can complicate the collection of web analytics including IP addresses assigned in offices that may create duplicate matches or duplicate metrics. And there are other issues of course nowadays with privacy and blocking software that limit the ability for us to collect every single visitor's data. However, I generally find that metrics in web analytics software that those problems that exist typically exist day to day. They are not starting one day or significant in one month and not the next. So I find that the data typically levels out. There may be some general errors within the data. It may not be exactly precise. However, we can measure a lift in traffic or we can see news sources. We can see when pages start having increased bounce rates. In other words, they may be failing. So even though some of those errors exist, the data when used as a whole can still be incredibly helpful in helping us figure out who our constituents are and how they are using our web properties. So web analytics is the measurement collection and analysis of those web metrics. We think it is to find answers to the questions we have usually about how we can improve our work, how we can make our websites perform better for those who are engaging our constituents and how we can actually take action towards meeting our goals better. And while there's a lot of benchmarks out there around the industry and we have a lot of organizations that are creating regular benchmark reports each year, they are all nice to know and they are definitely helpful but none of them are us. They are averages of a variety of organizations or sectors of our industry often combining organizations that look very unalike. The best way we can compare our metrics is by comparing against our own data. So comparing year to year, monthly averages, and campaign to campaign over time. That's going to help us best improve. So first and foremost, you already got a screenshot. It looks like y'all are looking in and starting to play around in Google Analytics. It sounds like hopefully everyone here has already been in Google Analytics before. But first and foremost is just to remember this view by date. It's very easy to get lost in the data of Google Analytics and forget the date settings that are being applied across your metrics. So the view date settings are always in the upper right-hand corner of any screen or any report you're looking at within Google Analytics. And they can be easily changed to include just about any amount of time and also to compare any amount of time across another amount of time. With comparing time frames, we believe it's actually helpful or most helpful to compare annual time frames. So this past month versus this month last year versus the same month the year before. It's frequent habit of a lot of folks to compare month to month, but that's not always going to be an accurate picture of our website and how it's being used. Comparing December to November is probably going to be completely skewed because of our end of the year fundraising appeals and other campaigns or annual reports that we may be putting out at the end of the year in December that are driving a lot of traffic where November may be a month and we don't have as many communications pointing people to our website. So by comparing year to year, we can better see the type of metrics as they relate to a similar time of year before. Likewise, I would also encourage us to remember that campaigns, so campaigns are timely events that often have specific goals or sub-goals from our larger ongoing communications work. We can often also throw off our metrics. If we're partaking in Giving Tuesday or another Giving Day, then that's probably going to have an increase in web views and searches than other days of the year. And so those campaigns may also need to be compared against other similar campaigns or past participation in those campaigns to get the best metrics. When we're looking at all of these analytics, when we're looking through all the metrics, what we're typically looking for is spikes. We're looking for changes in behavior. We're looking for when something different happened. Sometimes that may be a slow increase over time and sometimes that may be a sudden lift or a sudden spike like we see here in which we might want to investigate and figure out what exactly happened that caused the increase in visits on the specific date. The spikes are often going to be telling of key incidents when something has occurred. So let's get started with Google Analytics. So why Google Analytics? It's become, as I was saying, the industry standard, especially for nonprofit organizations for measuring our web traffic. It is a truly robust tool that is free and basically fairly easy to set up to start tracking the metrics that you want to know about your website. The one problem with it is that it, of course, does track so much data and so many metrics that it can be a bit overwhelming to make sense of it all and to understand what it means. Google Analytics also provides these stats and can help us if we understand how to set it up. They help us create dashboards, reports, or even goals and funnels that allow us to easily focus on the metrics that are most important to us and most relate to our goals. Note that there is a paid version of Google Analytics now called Google Analytics Premium along with the whole Google Analytics 360 suite of tools that they are rolling out. Premium is I think really only necessary for very, very large organizations with very complex web ecosystems. So organizations with more than 50 websites for tracking data for, chapter sites, micro sites or otherwise, and really in-depth robust campaigns in which they need the one-on-one support from Google that premium comes with. And it does come at a cost. So setting up our Google Analytics. Hopefully you've already done this, but Google Analytics provides you a simple tracking code via your Google Analytics tracking ID, your Google Analytics code, or now utilizing Google Tag Manager. Whichever method you use, there are step-by-step directions within Google Analytics that will walk you through how to do it, how to verify you on a site, and how to properly set up your code and verify your code is working. Do note that some features we'll even talk about today require that you're using the latest version of the code in order to properly utilize, like demographics or events. Some configuration tips for while we're setting up these analytics accounts and profiles. If you may notice when you're using other websites, third-party websites, Tumblr even, or you're creating a new micro site, maybe for a specific campaign that you're launching, that you can add multiple websites to your Google Analytics account, and they can each have separate ID numbers so that they're tracked separately, or you can use the same Google Analytics ID across multiple websites. I would encourage you to think about doing the former of using one Google ID or Analytics ID, and that tracking ID is that UA number that you see right here in the middle, is that I would use one ID per website you're tracking. Micro sites are the only ones that we may sometimes do differently, but we can combine these metrics from multiple sites and look at them across different domains. So there's no need to use one ID for multiple sites, and if we use them individually, it'll allow us to better filter and see data to specific properties. So what this looks like in practice is our container folder is going to be our account folder. So you'll probably have one container folder, that's that very first one here that says idealware, and you'll probably have one container folder for your organization. And then underneath that, you would have your different account IDs for a web domain or web property that you're setting up. Beneath that, you can create filters in which you can filter the data in order to look at the data in different ways. So if you want to continually filter out staff traffic via your IP addresses used internally at your office, or if you want to filter out certain spam referrals, there are ways we can do that with filters. So your account, your site, and your filter. The one other note is that first filter, that first view you set up, is don't ever apply a filter to that very first view you set up. Allow that first view of data when you first set up your account to be a non-filtered raw data file. And the reason being is you can always duplicate that and create an additional filter, so you can create an additional view of your data in which you apply those filters we just talked about, removing certain web traffic or certain referrals. But the problem is once you apply a filter, it stops tracking that data. Whatever data you filtered out isn't just hidden from your report. It actually stops being tracked. So you want to make sure that you have one raw data view of which no filters are applied so that you can always go back to the original in case there are any other issues in the future. So what does Google Analytics collect? Well, we have the sidebars along this left-hand side of your screen when you sign in that'll help you filter through the different types of data that's available to us. And we're going to walk through each of these individually and talk about what they provide for you. So first and foremost is audience. And within the audience section, we're going to see a lot of information specifically about that, our audience. That's going to include who they are, but also how they're using our site. And we're also going to have some information that has to be configured but your demographic information. But first and foremost, your audience is going to include your sessions, your users, your page views, your bounce rate, your percentage of new sessions. I feel like these are kind of the five basic metrics we get across most Google Analytics dashboards. And they should for the most part be self-explanatory. Sessions is a number of times your site has been visited. Users are the number of viewers and unique viewers to your site. Page views are the total number of pages. So one viewer may reload the same page 10 times or may visit 10 pages. So there will be multiple views. And then your bounce rate in percent of new sessions, two quality stats that can help out a lot of organizations make some decisions on where to focus on our website. Our bounce rates are the percentage of people who immediately leave after visiting one page. And we have to remember that not everybody visits our website via the home page. They may have received a link in our email or received a link via Twitter or seen a shared article via Facebook. So bounce rates are on every page of our site as well as our site overall has an average bounce rate. So that bounce rate is going to really help us figure out how interesting our content often is and that we can tell whether or not the actions in the content have resulted or the calls to action in our content have resulted in follow-up actions. So if we have a just to put this in perspective here if we have an advocacy petition on our website and we're linking to it and we see though that in Google Analytics that that web page hosting the advocacy petition has a high bounce rate then we probably know that the advocacy petition is not effective in getting people to sign it because signing it would have been an action and would have taken them to a confirmation page. So therefore they wouldn't have bounced they would have gone to a secondary page. There are some times though when bounce rates are actually good for instance if somebody is looking up our phone number or address and they're googling that and they're taken to our contact page they see our phone number or address the next logical step for them is to close out the browser because they're calling us or writing us a check and so they're done with that and so in that case the bounce rate may not be such a bad thing. Percentages of new sessions are just that the percentage that Google thinks are from first-time visitors. Just remember that this is not 100% accurate because it is utilizing cookies that are stored in browser settings in order to track whether or not the visitor has been to the site before and as most of us know and probably experienced ourselves all of our browsers are different and set differently for how long we track cookies. Some people track them indefinitely some they're cleared out of the session. That big problem with the bounce rate was just as describing is it's really helpful for understanding when we have content that has clear cause to action. It's helpful for us understanding whether or not those pages often landing pages we're calling them because the first page somebody lands on on our website. It's helpful in knowing whether or not those actions are working because if they didn't take the actions but as mentioned it can be problematic in telling exactly what it means and that it may mean they got the information they needed like on a bio or a contact page and so they had no other need to stay around the site. So just knowing that it can mean two different things sometimes the same stat can mean two different things depending on the content we're applying it to. Chris can I just this is Terry let me just interject something about sort of the bounce rate and I just want to support what you're saying right? If you look at your landing pages for example in Google Analytics if you drill into the landing page report and for example I'm looking at ours on the IllinoisLegalAid.org site and the first landing page is our homepage and it has a bounce rate of 27% which is good. The next page is a content page and the content is what's the difference between dismissed with and without prejudice? The bounce rate on that page is 96%. So obviously the way I read that is people are getting the answer they need right from that page and from that page they're drilling in to additional content. And actually let's go and talk about the things we can do in those cases like that's a great example. You have great resource or article it sounds like it's providing the content they need you didn't necessarily expect another action or a follow-up step. But something else that we can do is use events and we're going to come back and talk about events later is that on those pages like an article where we want to know well did people actually read the article or not? Events can help us in tracking scrolls and so we can for instance I often will track a 75% scroll meaning that I'm tracking what percentage of users scrolled 75% down on the page as an idea of who read the article. So we may need to start looking at secondary stats but so other information under audiences audience reports that we can find including that demographic information that they've somewhat recently a couple years ago now added we can find out who's using our site based on what type of device. So desktop versus mobile versus tablet you're undergoing a new website redesign you're trying to help your executive staff understand the need to budget a responsive a mobile friendly website we can show them clear stats on who's using our website via what device and you can even see from here often the percentages of sessions but also the bounce rate and so what we'll typically find is that the bounce rate will be very high for mobile visit on websites that are not mobile friendly or mobile optimized and that makes sense, right? If the user is coming to our website via mobile device and they're getting a webpage that's hard to read they're not going to stick around so we can utilize that mobile data to help back up some decisions we need to make on managing our systems and ensuring that they're mobile friendly we can use it to understand what technology folks are using if we want to know what browser or what operating system folks are using when visiting our site we can see geo information to figure out what city, states or even countries people are visiting us from we can see behavior and engagement information so including how long users stay on our website as a whole or even specific pages and then we can now see interest and demographics now to note the interest and demographic data does have to be enabled so it is not collected by default it has to be turned on and you do have to be using the latest Google Analytics code so if you aren't sure or you haven't seen this before it's really simple all you have to do is go to Google Analytics go under the audience and you'll see the instruction then demographics and you'll see instructions there and a button that says enable and it will tell you whether or not you're using the correct code and if you need to update it it will provide the code to update it the demographic data as you can imagine is pretty great it's not 100% reliable as in that a lot of people of course have not provided demographic information many times in which demographic information is actually hidden because there's not enough information that they can't aggregate it without giving away confidential information so for instance if you get one visit from a specific city Google won't share that information with you because it gives away potentially the privacy of somebody you might be able to figure out who it is based on what city they came from what webpage they looked at so it only utilizes the demographic information when it has enough of a data set to anonymize it and ensure that no privacy is being compromised. Likewise the interest information gives you some very general high level interest buckets that your users are known or your visitors, your website visitors are known to be interested in based on other things they've done this can be helpful it's very general so it depends on your organization and how you could or might use this information but we have used this interest information for instance with an advocacy organization we saw that there was a actually a similar here there was a high level of movie lovers and so we were able to actually start talking about the organization's issue in the context of movies in which the topic had been presented or brought up and we found that it was actually a really interesting way for us to talk about the organization's issue which was actually violence because it actually would met better basically to our constituents and that the content was something that we knew a majority of our audience already enjoyed was movies so it can sometimes be interesting because of other content we might decide to focus on or create the other thing to remember is that throughout this audience section throughout all the reports within the audience section and elsewhere within Google Analytics we can drive down deeper into our metrics by utilizing the secondary dimension and so sometimes this is not very helpful I often find that the the primary metrics I most need are usually already pulled out in these columns that we see on most reports by Google Automatically they know what a lot of their primary metrics are but there are times where we may want to compare against the secondary metric so we may want to see who's visiting our website plus how deep they go so who's visiting our website by device mobile or desktop to how deep they go how many pages they visit and so those would be the types of things we can utilize with secondary metrics so you'll see when you click that secondary metric dropdown on any report you'll see the full list of different dimensions that can be brought in you can also type in the search field anything that you either label that you already know of a specific metric or a word that you think applies and Google does a fairly good job of trying to help guide us into the right list there so actually this is a good one that we did of combining both locations and age groups so both locations geographic location of our users our visitors to our website and age group demographics are both readily available to us as separate reports but there isn't a combined report and so we wanted to see here whether or not we had different site traffic and visitors not just by location but also what were the age group breakdowns of the different countries people were visiting us from acquisition so the acquisition section is going to tell us just that it's information that helps us understand how we came to acquire the web visitors and that's going to include all their sessions and possible conversions if we have set up conversions and goals so we'll talk about those in a bit but it's also going to include information around organic search people who found us naturally organic in search means we didn't pay for it it means it was a natural listing in a search engine result that the user clicked and found us direct are those visitors who clicked a link, who saved a link or who already knew the link or typed it into the browser so if they didn't have another website or medium but they otherwise somehow clicked the link, typed it in clicked it via email typed it in or chose a bookmark that was previously saved referral is traffic from another website so any third party website, any website you don't own is considered a referral Google is doing better at dividing social network traffic into a social section but we should note that sometimes social traffic will be combined under referral as well and it will sometimes also be separated out we see this commonly with mobile links that are clicked from Facebook and Twitter using Twitter's t.co link shortener or Facebook's m.facebook.com URL format for their mobile visit so it'll be up to you to figure out how you're going to look at that you can filter those views directly out of your reports when you're looking at referral reports and that way you can separate them out and see the social traffic versus the referral the true third party referral traffic so looking at some of the ways that we can utilize the reports that come within acquisitions we can utilize the channels to understand how folks are finding us whether organic or paid search direct, referral, social you may have actually noticed we are starting to see more and more email separated out automatically by Google Google is really good at understanding referrals via or acquisitions via email when the email was a Google account a Gmail account it's not really great at understanding it yet when it's other email providers and so the email of course is not going to be entirely accurate and so I personally have not really used email that much yet as I'm still waiting on it for a little bit more we also have our social acquisition and so we can tell what social networks folks are finding us from remember that all of these referrals all of these acquisitions are not necessarily our own shared content so this doesn't necessarily mean these are people who came and visited via our Facebook page it's people who came via any Facebook page so that includes both the post your sharing the content your sharing and linking back to your website your content anybody else may be sharing across social networks so the social report obviously is a great place to find out which social network works best for driving traffic to your site when combined with secondary metric dimensions you can determine things like not only which social network drives the most traffic to your site but which users from which social network spend the most time on your website or convert via a goal in other words sign a petition make a donation or sign up for your email list we can also utilize campaign reports and campaign reports do require source coded URLs but if you're using Google's URL builder which is a really easy tool to add secondary source information to your URLs then that sourced your information like the campaigns will be tracked directly here within our campaigns and so each of these were source coded URLs that we see in the campaigns example and we named what the code was which allows us to easily track how that URL with the code was utilized across multiple channels across different social networks across the emails we're sending out across sharing from our website even so when creating campaigns you can use those tracking codes and you can group them into actions so this is actually a screenshot that we utilized with a campaign that we were running last year in which we were doing different types of outreach for a new event and we had a campaign website and we wanted to track all the different ways folks were coming to our website beyond the built in methods of social network or referral third party website so we knew we had ads that we were going to be placing across multiple digital channels and blogs we had Google partners which were secondary ads so basically just a part of the Google ad network we had our organizational outreach partners we also had pre-launch communications that were coming from our own organization so we separated out each of these individual campaigns and we even utilized more detailed source coding to identify those specific places we were placing the ads and the specific partners who were promoting our campaign and so we could dive down into this data and we could clearly see what type of outreach we did that was the most effective across communications channels both online and off and we were also able to tell which partners performed best in outreaching for the event as well as which ads performed best so this is that URL form builder I was talking about in which we have opportunities to create five keyword or five source code keywords three are required and that is your source, your medium and your campaign and it's pretty clear in the instructions from the URL builder but you can have the exact same thing for all three if need be so if your campaign that you're tracking is not that detailed you could use the same campaign name across source, medium and campaign but if you can get detailed or have the ability or going to be utilizing multiple channels and you want to track that very carefully we can put in different sources so where do we plan to use the URL different mediums what are the different assets or formats in which we're going to utilize the URL across the different sources and then campaign is the name that it ties in together we can also look at our behavior of our constituents and understand how they're utilizing our website we'll see those very first stats that we talked about earlier on including different page views, unique viewers we also have average time on site the bounce rate again and the exit rate so just to reiterate the bounce rate was the percentage of people who bounce after visiting one web page that's different than the exit rate which is the percentage of people for which the web page they're looking at was the last web page they looked at whether they looked at one or 10 before doesn't matter so those numbers will be different across our pages we did also talk about I think it was such terrorist point even about the bounce rate being around 27% we talked about not comparing to too much to industry averages but I think it is interesting to know and helpful to know that the average time on web pages industry-wide for nonprofits is typically around two minutes so if folks are spending more than two minutes on your page you're doing great but if you are really wanting to compare and improve then of course we should be comparing against our own numbers for bounce rate we typically find industry average bounce rates are between 25 and 50% and they range drastically and that is because different pages can have higher or low bounce rates for different reasons and that's completely normal typically speaking if we're trying to get a lower bounce rate or trying to keep people engaged then we want to aim for around 25% bounce rate a 50% bounce rate is still average anything above about a 50% bounce rate could be problematic depending on what the content is again to Terry's point sometimes that's actually exactly where we want it to be so behavior is going to give us information like unique page views that average time spent on the page also the entrances so the number of times users entered our site through any specific page and the total exits on each of those pages as well I do look at this information especially the average time spent on a site and average time spent on specific pages I'll often look at to help figure out which web pages are keeping people's attention which web pages people maybe leave very quickly to determine where we might edit our content to add additional information provide clear calls to action or next steps to try to keep them engaged or even to link related articles to giving the user something next to do this is also true of our entrance pages if we know that we have specific pages that have the highest number of users entering our website so this is often not our home page these would be considered landing pages then we probably want to make sure that those web pages speak well about our organization and provide the users especially possibly first time users with clear ideas of where to find their way around the site so if we have a large number of users who are coming to our about page first but we've put on our home page the introduction to who we are and how much we raised last year then that home page message may not reach those who are landing on the about page first so that's where we can focus on those landing pages and most used landing pages to best understand how people are entering our website so I always love looking at this as a navigation and behavioral flows which will really allow us to visually see how users are visiting our website and we will notice from these that users are going everywhere on our home page they're going to our secondary landing pages there some are then going off to other informational pages or content pages and then we'll often have a large number of folks who are coming in via other means outside of our home page whether that specific articles or specific landing pages and it can be interesting to see where they're going are they like we see here in this example so this bottom group down here is people who are coming in to this combined group of other pages but we can see that a majority of those or a large number of them are actually going to the articles section next and we can see from red highlight here that a vast majority of those visiting the articles pages are actually leaving the website before reading another article so this might give us a sense of where we have an opportunity to go fix the improvements around our website because we're losing a number of people there that might be a pain point or an opportunity where we can fix and try to retain more users the question often is asked whether or not that exit rate is important or not because they are going to leave at some time does it matter where they left from I think it's similar to our bounce rate in that it depends sometimes a high exit rate makes sense so the confirmation page or the acknowledgement page of your donation form probably has a really high bounce rate users go to your website they click on donate they fill out their form, make a donation they get a thank you page so thank you so much for donating and usually not much else it makes sense that we're going to have a high number of exits on that acknowledgement page it's up to us Additionally with legal services a lot of what we are trying to do is get people information in the least amount of clicks and put it on a single page so it's easy for them to access so having that trajectory of traveling around your site a lot may actually may actually be a problem and not an advantage the metrics are very different when we look at this particular group of nonprofits that is such a great point I think it just goes back to it depends we need to determine whether or not the metrics make sense the exit rates make sense for the web pages that we're reviewing and if we for instance want people to stick around and read an article, watch a video or do something after donating then we might need to improve that acknowledgement form for that acknowledgement page to try to keep their attention longer if we are excited they're leaving because it means they're going off and doing something or calling us or doing work offline then that exit rate may be a plus conversions conversions are absolutely amazing and wonderful and unfortunately can be a little bit complicated so conversions are basically the different ways in which we want our users to convert and that can mean anything you want it to mean so conversion can be a goal conversion can be a donation was made so we want 10% of the people who visit our donation form to complete their donation that would be set up as a goal conversion and then it will track our total completions of the goal and give us a conversion rate we might even be able to assign a goal value to the conversion this is really easy for things like donations where we know are an average we can look at our historical data and we can figure out that are an average for every 10 online donations we have that the average is out at $25 of donations so we could then maybe value our goal completion at a certain amount to help us understand the value of the percentage of people who are converting but it's not necessary unless you're utilizing Google ads for your ping for your goals then you want to know whether or not the amount of money you're paying is actually resulting in returning in the proper conversions if your conversions are donations are downloads of a report or a document a percentage scroll of a web page so maybe understanding or trying to understand how people are reading content viewing of a video filling out a form a request form or a volunteer form or signing up for an event or signing a petition any of these hosted on your website can be a conversion there's a great question here in the chat which is how would you best track whether a linked file was downloaded how do you get that information into your analytics how would you track whether or not it was downloaded the file was downloaded and that's actually done via what's called events and so events in Google Analytics are not built in they are a piece of secondary code that has to be added so any links to PDF documents spreadsheets, Word documents PowerPoint documents or even video or sound files from our website those links those clicks are not tracked in Google Analytics automatically unless you put specific event code into your links if you're using something like WordPress they actually make a really great plugin that you can use across your entire website and it will automatically insert that code into all links if you're using your own system and you're utilizing an HTML built system then just depending on how your system is built you'll probably have to do that code individually for each link you want to track so for each download you want to track you'll have to code that URL a little annoying unfortunately Google Tag Manager we should say is actually going to make this much easier Google Tag Manager which we'll also talk about again in a second but Google Tag Manager is a new tool that Google is providing that allows you to quickly and easily set up these types of conversions that we want to track whether that's a certain button on a web page to be clicked or a form to be completed or any other action the Tag Manager is Google's new tool trying to simplify all of this unfortunately it is not simple yet so it does require a learning courage and it does require knowledge of HTML and ensuring that the proper HTML is used across your website header properties so a bit of a technical answer but hopefully that answers the question. We'll move this right along here so let's talk about conversions some more so conversions actually connect there are two main types of conversions there are goals which is just saying the number of people who have done something like download a document reached a certain page scrolled a certain percentage of a page we can set any of those single actions as a goal. There are also multi channel funnels and multi channel funnels is a multi step goal so we can think of a multi channel funnel as being maybe our end of the year fundraising campaign. We're posting across multiple websites and trying to get people to come to our our page on our website where we're hosting a video telling them about the important work we're doing we want them to watch the video and then click the button below it that says donate now we want them to go to the donation form complete the donation and receive that confirmation page so there were multiple steps from visiting the website landing on the web page watching the viewer video clicking the donate button making the donation so that funnel can be set up and the funnel can have multiple steps and multiple entrance points as well and so they can help us figure out how people are utilizing the site in more complex methods or more complex tracking so conversion doesn't have to be complex there are actually some information online that can help you figure it out but it can and I would start with goals in that it's as simple as identifying a specific action that people are taking so it can be as simple as saying the percentage of people who reach the confirmation page the thank you page after making the donation that's our goal and if we start with those simple goals I will start to see how they work and we can then create more complex ones so actually I'm curious at this point are there any stats or metrics we've talked about that sound useful to folks that we maybe you're not looking at right now or haven't looked at in depth and would want to go back and look at further now this has been a great overview so far okay and Chris let me just say that and I think I've said this before on other webinars so this may not be the first time that some folks have heard it but I find that behavior flow report to be like it makes my head hurt whenever I look at it but your explanation did provide some insight into it so thank you yeah I so my issue with the behavior report is it's too much information right it can quickly be overwhelming so my rule on any time I feel overwhelmed by information is trying to find the top three takeaways and so I look at that and thankfully they do visually put it in order so the most visits or most visits to the next page the most navigated visit should appear at the top I think what complicates it for a lot of folks is that there's always a big bucket at the bottom that's group that's all the other pages visited grouped together so I just suggest ignoring that because that's not really helpful knowing that 20% of the people from this web page visited some other web page on the website I want to know what are the top three most visited web pages after a certain web page with visited so if we're looking at using the example that was just provided at a web page on our website that has legal resources and a legal document then I would actually want to know that the navigation is to actually download that document or maybe to a contact form because we maybe we want people to contact us about that resource versus going to look at other resources or using the search page if I see that the search page is up in the top or like the example you know what let me actually pull that up while I'm talking here the example I just had looking through and seeing that so this here the thing that a large number of users who view the all other articles are going to the articles main landing page I mean that first and foremost tells me that users who are reading these articles are looking for more articles from ideal standpoint that's a good thing we want people to go look at other resources we have available and look at other articles the drop off from that is something that we could improve because that means that they're not finding what they wanted and the example that y'all gave though of the legal resource being that possibly the end of the user's experience of we wanting it to keep it as short as possible then them looking for more articles could imply that they're not finding the information they wanted in the first article and so that may actually be a bad thing and that's where it could be interesting to me so we're going to talk about the body of data that's available to us and how we can utilize that in different ways a bit further here so the good news is most of the information that we need is available to us already it's just a matter of figuring out where it is there's a lot of metrics and data that's already being tracked across other channels outside of web analytics including email metrics so whether using MailChimp and getting really beautiful graphics or using constant compact or vertical response constant contact MailChimp or using your own built-in email math email system they all have different types of metrics that are available to you and they're generally the same metrics you have your open rate your click-through rate and an unsubscribe rate you may also have a conversion rate depending on whether or not you had link and whether or not your email system is associated with your content management system your CMS but the basics you're going to have open click-through and unsubscribe rate your open rate is going to be a general estimate to the percentage of people who received your email who actually opened it remember that open rates are based on whether or not a hidden image that's been inserted into your email was downloaded from the server from the recipient's computer so that little technical aspect of having to download images in order for us to know whether or not somebody's opened an email does mean that our open rates are a minimum they're not entirely accurate and the reason being is that a lot of users have images image downloads and emails disabled as a security feature also there's some issues with certain email clients and even some older mobile devices literally telling the server it downloaded the image when it did so I always look at my open rate as a minimum we know that at least 51.56% of the people who received this last email we sent opened it and again I like to compare against our own industry averages or our own, excuse me, organizational averages because I'm much more interested in how we have compared to our past emails than I am how we compared to other organizations that look at something like us. MailChimp does provide an industry average click-through rate which can be interesting again not entirely important what is important is our click-through rate so we can see here that 16.4% of those who opened the email clicked on a link within the email and most email systems will combine any click in the email as a click-through rate so if you have multiple resources linked or multiple calls to action they may not be tracked independently depending on the URLs used and the type of email program used so generally speaking open rate is going to tell us how interesting our subject line was how much people care about our brand if they recognize our name and how busy they are on the day and the time that they saw the email you sent that's really all that tells us it doesn't tell us whether or not somebody cares about the content we emailed because they haven't seen the content yet they hadn't opened it so it can only reference who sent the email when it was sent and the subject line and possibly the preview text the very first few words in the email that may show up in the user's inbox preview pane the click-through rate is going to be the content interest metric it's going to tell us whether or not users read the information we emailed them and whether or not they found specific information important and that is one of the reasons I truly believe that emails for our constituents drive them back to a web page so that we can get a measurement of interest if we're including the entire resource in the email or the entire content in the email like I see sometimes long 4 or 5, 20 page newsletters sent in the email then we really have no idea who's read what and what content was most useful we've also created a very long large document to our constituents which may not be the best way for them to be receiving and reading our content that's a really interesting one because in the legal community we love email we really, really like it and the click-through rate to an actual web resource that covers the same thing is really small so for example if we just did a video over this webinar I would put as much information as possible into that email and the old link would be a link to the slides over on slide share where I can track it and a link to the video they may never even touch the website but the less information that I put into that email the less likely they are to actually go watch the video or pick up the other resources but how much information you want and where you want them to be matters a lot. Exactly and that may be also depending on who you're contacting so I find that the smaller your email list is so the more targeted your list is the better you know the recipients the longer you can usually write in an email. It's usually the long like I just got one day the day I just got an email newsletter from an organization and the email newsletter was six pages long six email pages long of tech and it wasn't user it wasn't friendly for my mobile device and also they got no information on what of the they were telling me about basically five or six different topics and resources all in one long email which they have no measure now of what I found interesting because there was nothing to click so. And I think on a really important one there also on the mobile part your email must be mobile optimized we have a higher percentage of individuals who are viewing email almost exclusively through phones simple make it very easy to see on a mobile device even anything you can do to optimize how quickly it downloads helps a lot. Completely agreed we're easily seeing 50% of web visitors nowadays generally speaking are coming from mobile devices and 70% of email opens are generally coming from mobile devices and around 85% of Facebook users are using mobile devices so even when we're sharing content on Facebook we need to be thinking if the web content that we're linking to the article we're linking to on our website is our website mobile friendly is it responsive and especially with email you are having so hit the nail right on the head if an email does not read well in my mobile device I'm probably going to archive it or delete it I'm not going to save it to read later unless I have a really good relationship with your organization so some other stats that we can look at wrong way here other stats we can look at include social media metrics hopefully we've all seen these but I do typically find that even those of us who know about them are actively using them so I would just encourage us to look at these on a monthly basis Facebook insights are the metrics associated with our Facebook accounts our pages these are for brand pages not for personal accounts and not for groups so these are only associated with pages that our organizations would probably have in men they're going to tell us a lot of the same data we get via the web metrics specific to our Facebook users who are they how are they using our Facebook page what posts are they clicking on how many people are we reaching Twitter analytics is a bit newer but mimics a lot of the information we'll find in Facebook insights put analytics can be found via your gear icon and right-hand drop-down of Twitter and then just choosing analytics or you can go to analytics.twitter.com and immediately go into the Twitter account the analytics account same thing Twitter analytics is going to give us a bunch of different data related to who our users are including demographic information where they are gender identity age groups interest levels as well as how they're engaging with us so which of our posts are being retweeted replied to how many times our accounts are mentioned both Facebook insights and Twitter analytics have an engagement rate and I do like to just share that they are slightly different in that Facebook insights utilizes reach and Twitter utilizes impressions to calculate our engagement rate what this basically means is a reach are the total number of unique people our content has reached Facebook knows reach and Facebook knows reach very very well because Facebook knows how many times it delivers our content to how many people and it calculates that for us impressions are the total number of time our content was displayed for those users it reached we may have reached a thousand unique users but the content was displayed our posts were displayed 1500 times so we have more impressions than we do reach Twitter unfortunately utilizes impressions which is the number of times your tweet was displayed and not necessarily the unique count of users that we find with Facebook's reach that doesn't mean that the engagement numbers are slightly different because impressions on Twitter are going to be much much greater than the amount of number of people we've reached on Facebook but we will typically find that the engagement rate across both sites will hover sometime somewhere between five percent it may be less it may be more depending on your organization but I usually look at a two to five percent range as an average range depending on the organization I'm working with and and we of course are trying to increase our engagement rate our engagement rates are just that it's the rate of people who saw our content who actually engaged with it who liked it clicked on it reshared it commented on it watched the video those are all engagements and they're combined to get our engagement rate also remember that Facebook and Twitter both give us analytics on our users and where they're at as well which can be helpful if we're ever planning local events so I did this with an author we were working with and we were planning some local meetups and we were trying to figure out what towns what cities to target and so we went through their web and social analytics and looked at the demographic information of where people were visiting our accounts from and who our users were and we were able to tell where we already had a large number of folks in what top ten cities and then we could plan to target our events in the cities where we already had a following we already know there's an audience if you're using Facebook's targeted post option you can even reach just those people so if we're doing an event in New York City we can use Facebook's targeting option when writing any post to our page it's right there next to the thin button or the schedule button and you can tell Facebook to only show that post to people who are in New York City so we can then use the metrics to understand where people are at to then target information and content towards those people YouTube insights are also incredibly interesting in that if you're not utilizing YouTube yet definitely consider it as a communications channel reconsider it if it's something that your organization used to use and haven't come back to in a while whereas the last several years on social media has been kind of the year of images or years of images and media the current this year and the coming years are the year of video whether it's live video or recorded video we're going to see video usage continue to increase and YouTube is still the number one video hosted website in the world has implemented a bunch of nonprofit options lately including the ability to get 100% donations via YouTube videos so our YouTube insights are going to tell us lots of data beyond just our viewer count and so I find that often organizations are looking at our subscriber our channel subscriber number and we're looking at the number of views a specific video got and those are both great numbers but they don't tell the whole story so if you click on the number of views any video got you can get into the deeper data for that video for videos that you have access to that you own on your channel you can get deeper data including the different types of engagements that videos got but you can also walk through your video and you can see exactly how users watched your video you can see at what second on your video users we can help you figure out how do we create better video content by ensuring that we don't have those drop off points or figuring out what we did during that drop off point that possibly lost users interest we can again of course find demographic information about who's using our videos who's watching our videos where they're from gender and age groups as well and finally our blog metrics if we're holding or utilizing secondary blog functionality like medium, tumblr, wordpress or any other third party system outside of our main website then we just want to make sure we've also put analytics tracking on our blog whether that's built in so the built in metrics already provided by the software we're using or if it's setting up Google Analytics make sure that we're getting a full picture of how people are viewing our content and then we can also track offline metrics it can be a little bit harder but we can track the number of mailings we've sent out, the number of people who've received the mail we can track the number of responses we've received to those offline we can even use vanity URLs or short URLs to create custom URLs in our print materials so we can track how many people take online actions based on our offline actions and finally it's not enough just to track all this or have access to this we actually have to analyze all of this data we have to look and figure out what does it mean there are various ways of doing that and I think the most common way that most of us are doing it is what we call measurements as therapy and this is the idea that we post an article to our Facebook page this morning and we go back and look at it a couple hours later or maybe after the session is over or tomorrow morning and we see how many likes it got or how many comments it got and we feel good about that or we don't it's measurement as therapy or how many Instagram photos get or how many favorites or retweets our tweet gets on a case by case basis it's probably not the most helpful in helping us manage our communications better and take better actions for reaching our goals it's just going to either make us feel bad or feel good sometimes it can help us spot trends so we can see if an article or a post is overperforming and in fact Facebook is very good at telling us all now this whenever a post overperforms because they want us to boost it so in those instances that might be helpful to look at but otherwise we're not going to want to look at a post day to day it's often going to take several hours possibly several days for the metrics to truly accumulate in matter another common method of data exploration is measurement is exploration and this is when something has happened and we're trying to figure out what happened so we have a large number of views or we suddenly have 20 donations come through and we normally get one a day or we see a spike in the number of completions or registrations for an event or maybe even reads or visits to an article or download of a resource we're probably going to want to start to explore what happened in those situations we're going to want to look at the sources for those to figure out how people got there and we're going to want to look at what they did next to figure out how well the content served them again it's interesting and helpful information but it's not how we're going to manage our website in the long term to make informed decisions and improve our content in order to do that we're going to use measurement as action so measurement as action is actually thinking about the people who are utilizing our website and how they're utilizing it and making decisions based on the metrics provided that we can then measure and test so it's looking at our metrics and figuring out if we're looking at our social media metrics that we want to increase the number of folks who are clicking through from Twitter or we want to increase the conversion rate of users from Facebook or we want to increase the read through rate the scroll of a specific article then we're going to actually utilize metrics to help determine where we're at we're going to make changes and we're going to test whether or not it worked we do have to remember so measurement in general it's a lot of fun it's it can also be really really overwhelming there's so much information available to us I think it's Facebook's insights they have a download the excel option where you can download a spreadsheet of all your Facebook metrics and they used to I'm not sure if they still call it this but they used to call that download the list of priority metrics and they prioritized over 250 different metrics in that list it was overwhelming it's way too much and it's more than most of us can ever handle so we need to decide what to measure we're going to decide that around what our goals are we can often start that out by asking questions what are we trying to learn what are we trying to improve and what are we trying to accomplish those questions are going to help us understand the metrics that we need to be tracking in whether short-term or long-term and they're going to help us focus and find a little bit of balance between collecting really reasonable amounts but amounts that are going to give us quality information and allow us to make decisions I always go back to an old organization I used to work with that we were doing a database transfer with them and or merger with them and they had voting history data for constituents that they had somehow got to some other partnership and they had imported into their fundraising their donor database and we were transferring and they had hundreds of thousands of data fields and information related to all of this other data that they've been collecting and they wanted it transferred over a course and it was a bit of a mess and I said you know you've been collecting this I could see that they've been collecting it for years and I said I asked them I said you know tell me how have you ever used this data and unfortunately they couldn't because they had never used the data so that is only as useful as it is when we use it as we make it so if we're not using the data it's probably not important for us to focus on and we again figure out what we're focusing on by asking questions what are we trying to achieve what are we trying to accomplish so Chris we're at the hour and a half point here so I think this may be a good point to kind of wrap it up we are starting to lose people but I think we've got some really good information that has come out there is there a last point or two that you would like to close I think we can actually close on this which is just going back and figuring out what to do with our metrics is asking what are we trying to accomplish what do we want to change what do we want to learn what do we want to achieve explore the metrics to figure out what data we already have available to us figure out whether or not it gives us the answer hypothesize make it a informed version of what's happening and test those results if you're trying to increase the number of video views page views action completions make a decision and test it follow up with the metrics again and see whether or not it improved or not and that's how we will be able to utilize metrics best excellent well thank you so much for your time I also I'm gonna say thank you to Terry Ross out there for giving us some practical examples related to legal aid thank you so much for coming out we appreciate it thank you all have a good day