 Alright, hello everyone. Thanks for joining us this morning or this afternoon. We talked to you today on our webinar the nonprofit guides Google Analytics. We're going to give people a few more minutes to begin to continue to join us trying to go over some housekeeping things before we do get started. So during the this event we just asked that you either chat with us and zoom chat or raise your hand. We'll get a chance to call on you for some of those questions later on during the presentation. And as Julian and I are kind of trading off throughout this presentation will be answering some of those questions as we go right in the chat. You can also email us at or email learn at tech soup dot or with any questions or issues you have during the webinar or even after the webinar. We are recording this event is being recorded right now. You can choose to turn off on or off your audio and video so you're not part of that recording. We do ask that as we're talking you make sure that you stay on mute as well. Just quick introductions and background on us. I'm Kyle bark into one of the co-founders of tap network we are a digital transformation agency we work pretty heavily with nonprofit organizations my background is more in the technology and website development space. So a lot of this is very, very relevant to me myself and my background I'm joined today with our digital solutions manager Julian to Rashi. He's got says eight years of experience and he's got more than that at this point now with tap and digital marketing but we he's our go to guy here at tap. For all things Google all things analytics and many things web so we're in good hands today as we walk through this. Just some quick background on tap network as you go through is you came through this today as you come through the sites. All tech suits different websites and blogs and things of that nature you see a lot of you know different assets that are out there. From the platform it runs on to a lot of the content that gets pushed out and so a lot of these programs through tech suit we partner very heavily with tech suit to provide some of those services those programs that educational background and we do that same thing. Globally for nonprofit and mission driven organization so anything from digital marketing like support and services to customer application development and then education for these these organizations. Quick agenda for today. We're going to go through Google Analytics overview like what is it, how to use it or how we use it and how it can be used to drive effectiveness your organization how to read some of the reports and some best practices here. The basics of website traffic so what it means what it measures user behavior and conversion rates, and then we'll cover some practical applications towards the end. You know how can this actually put into into practice. So more specifically how can Google Analytics be analytics be used for nonprofit organizations. It's great because it's free and it's powerful that any nonprofit can use and really get set up and running at the base from the basic step takes some basic steps to get it in place so that you can start to track your traffic measure and analyze how your website performing things like where people coming from and some other events that we'll cover today. But what's really nice about it too is it's very extensible so it can really grow with you grow with your organization. You can really get a lot out of it to allow you to understand how people are using it and you know what ways to make improvements so it can really be live like sort of at the center of anything you're putting out there digitally it can really it can get really deep and track things like you know email opens and how emails convert back to your website it can track events like where people are coming from to your website from through social media, things of that nature without having to go out there and buy complicated or more expensive tools. And that allows you to make these data driven decisions, so you can increase efficiency and effectiveness and grow your organization grow your following. So just a quick high level overview, just if you can answer this in the chat and we'll kind of go over some of these, these results. Let us know which of these goals is most important for you or your organization is it and just if you guys can put the letter corresponding to the answer that's super helpful or feel free to type it out. Raising awareness driving donations attracting volunteers supporting your program delivery, building community advocating for change or sharing news and updates. Just a few seconds to let this to answer that watching them roll in now. And we've seen a lot of a is a lot of people putting in you know most of the letters. And I think one of the one of the cool things about Google analytics is that this really gives you the information to understand how you're doing on each one of these fronts. So we're able to not just say okay here's the information about xyz, we're able to apply that to some of these things so whether it's you know if your goal is to raise awareness, you know how is your message actually getting out there, how are people interacting with it. You're trying to drive donations. You know maybe if you tie Google analytics in with this CRM you can start to see you know how people who you're targeting you know maybe have made the donation in the past, how they're interacting with your site to maybe turn that into a current donation. How far this information some organizations are, they provide you know new research or new information, how far that's going out you know into the world where people are coming from, and even how you know things you've done in the past. There's just, you know, upcoming things that you're dealing with, but also you know as you release more information seeing how that's you know propagated throughout the internet throughout the rest of your digital marketing efforts. So with Google analytics here you get quite a lot. So, you know on a very basic level you get how users navigate your website, how they're you know where they're starting where that where they end up where they leave your websites, be able to see sort of the paths people take if you're coming from, you know we love people you know when they land on this page to go to these next ones can see how that path is actually working. You can also see where people are coming from so how your, your maybe social media posts how this how this driving users to your website whether they're coming from emails or even other refers. Also conversion rate data. That's really helpful for if you're trying to understand how how certain actions are being taken across the website saying hey, maybe we just released a report. We want to see, you know exactly how many people are actually, you know, converting on this how many people may be filling out a registration form for a program or specific events. Then a big one is midfinal campaign performance. So this is something we see here at the agency quite a lot nonprofits tend to be really good at you know stating initially what they're helping with the problem they're trying to solve, then also just making a donation. Hey, make this donation, sign up for this program. But a lot of digital marketing focuses on is the people who are maybe on the fence of it, we're in the middle. So they're the super enthusiastic people are going to find a way to make a donation find a way to register, you know, automatically, say people who you're trying to reach who maybe aren't familiar with the organization or maybe won't realize how impactful that your organization can be for maybe their specific problem or specific thing that trying to solve. Being able to understand how that your digital marketing efforts that target those midfinal people, you know how that how they're actually working. I don't give you the opportunity to use data to inform back on that make more and more effective campaigns over time. So here, just to sort of jump into Google analytics sort of terms, we're going to talk a little bit about the installation and then some some key definitions that are going to help contextualize the rest of the conversation so we're going to focus on traffic monitoring and event collection. So getting started with Google analytics. There's really two aspects of it, you have the technical side and the strategic side, the technical side is just a method of actually getting hooked up configured, getting it on to your site. So for this consult a professional we hear a tap you know help with a lot of Google analytics setups. They also have a fairly robust set of assistants if you want to get you know a basic introductory setup going can do that as well. And then getting that installed onto your site, I know WordPress offers a Google site kit plugin is other tools depending on the platform your website uses, it'll allow you to integrate it in different ways, but almost as just the technical aspect of getting that actually data flowing into the platform. Then there's the strategic side. So it's not enough to just have the information there you actually need to be able to use it. So understanding what information is going to be the most helpful is incredibly important. And identifying all the touch points that you're doing in your digital marketing and how you want to track them, you know, whether that's putting UTM codes on some of your email things, or your social media posts, where there's really identifying how, how often you want to see people submitting forms things like that, figuring out what exactly is going to be the most helpful you to track and report on is going to be the second aspect of Google analytics. So if we jump in, we're not going to focus too much on universal analytics, which is the old version of Google analytics just because so much has changed here in Google analytics for. So the big thing you want to know is data streams so this is a new concept here and this replaces the traditional tracking code that you may have you know some advanced setups if you have you know a fairly robust configuration already in universal analytics. So you're getting a separate tracking code for each sort of thing you're trying to track. You can set up one single Google analytics for property and include a lot of these data streams in here so you can do anything from from apps websites. When we say websites, we don't just mean one website before maybe if you had ticketing platform or a LMS platform, you'd need to set up a different Google analytics property and do some things sort of set them up with this you have one main property and then you can figure all these extra data streams that allows you say okay here we want to use this on our main domain we want to use this on our events platform. We want to use this, you know maybe on a landing page tool to be able to combine all these things into one property. So you can only have one data stream per data source, but that's going to be a single domain name and app, anything like that. So some of the benefits of data streams is more simplified so as I mentioned before if you were trying to track information across multiple domains, there's some more advanced configuration required. This is also built up into one, and also allows you to contextualize that information, a little bit better because it's bringing all those separate data streams into one Google analytics for property so now say you have a mobile app, we're able to use this and get get the information right alongside your web performance. And you're also able to control exactly what data you want in your platform. For example, if you have a specific website tool that you only want maybe page views on you don't need to be loading up into the data stream with a bunch of extra information. You can just sort of specify hey I only want to collect this from this data stream. It also allows you to share data, a little bit easier as well so say you're trying to track a user journey between your app and your website. This allows things to flow a lot more smoothly. The second event here is events and so this is the main building block that Google analytics for is built on. Before it used to be a lot of page based tracking and URL based tracking so they'd say hey we're going to crawl all of your URLs on your site and start to get information with this. So even page views are a type of events, it can be a form submission that's the type of events scrolling to the bottom of a page will get into some specific event types later, but these are user interactions with your website or your app that you want to track. It really provides a lot of valuable information when we're talking about how users are interacting through site and engaging with their content. And this is what allows you to measure the effectiveness it gives you an ability to quantify that engagement. It allows you to say hey we want to see how many people are actually getting to this you know call to action at the bottom of the page, you have a scroll event that sort of gives you that information and then you're able to report on how many people are actually clicking on that call to action towards the bottom here. So it is event based rather than page based. So now sessions are composed of multiple events that includes page views and any other sort of user interactions whether it's video plays form submissions, or anything like that. It really gives you this opportunity to figure out exactly where you can improve your website. For example, you could, you might discover that users are frequently clicking on a button that doesn't lead to a conversion, or they're dropping off from a form submission maybe halfway through they're not completing the form. And once you have this information, you can make these data driven decisions about how to optimize the website or app. It's really easy to tread water with digital marketing so you could be expending a lot of energy and not really going anywhere by having this data to back you up helps you become more efficient and effective. So we're going to jump into the basics and there's three things we're going to focus on right now we're going to take a look at the website's traffic user behavior and conversion rates. But with with the events just before you're setting up custom events there's a couple things here that you might want to take a look at the event category. So this is the the actual sort of the main events. And so to speak of the events of saying exactly what kind it is the action that people take so this is if you want to track, you know maybe playing a video simulating a form, anything like that. The label this helps you basically keep everything organized on the back end of your site and the event value. Once you start getting to a lot of advanced configurations, we're able to create events for for almost anything. There are some things where you still might want to use Google Tag Manager say tracking specific button or something like that, but Google Analytics for really opens up the field to to collect a lot of this information directly in the analytics platform itself. And like I say here, we're going to take a look at three things website traffic, the user behavior and the conversion rates and so each of these has like a little bit of specific information that I think is going to be you know applicable for a nonprofit of any size. So the first thing we're going to look at is traffic with in Google Analytics and Google Analytics for you've got a wide range of data available about your website visitors tell you everything at a high level for like you know total visitors on your site total traffic over time to get very like where they're coming from and very specific to what pages they're viewing what how long they're spending on those individual pages. Things that you're probably used to if you if you've implemented Google Analytics for before or looked at this but the common things and it's just it's kind of updated right like what's trackable what's seen there now Google Analytics for so at a high level. This is very useful to see you know look at things like campaigns or anything promotional that you're doing. Is it driving more traffic to your website as a whole and where is that traffic. Coming from and where is that what is that traffic doing when they come to your website so you get granular look at things like behavior. Where they're converting what events they're taking from there but it's gives you that kind of high level overview. So, from a traffic level, you can start then you can get granular look at things like is it like sessions and page views and the difference between these two things is a session is like a period of I'm not going to read from the slide so it starts when a user first comes to your website and they like first page view and then it stores like everything they do in the next 30 minutes of either activity or in activity or it picks over at midnight so if I come to a website it'll start tracking me right now and let's say I walk away and I come back you know 15 minutes later that's one that's still one session where I'm engaged in and taking action across that website. The difference between that page view is a page view is every single thing. Every single page view that person that person within that session or all page views as a whole that occur. When people visit the website so I might there might be one session with multiple page views Google analytics will show you that, but it's important to understand the difference between these two things as well as like unique users across those sessions. So you want to see, you know how often do people come to the website how many people came to the website and what was happening when they came there so there should be the kind of three different levels of metrics there. Just a quick, kind of some screenshots in here of how to look at these things so we can we talked about traffic and how that that can be pared down to see things like acquisition, where they came from, and then they engage in the engagements once they came to that site. So you'll see these kind of common reports that will exist in in Google analytics that would break this down by those different columns that you see across your screen it's configurable so you can see, you know, kind of any of these different data points across some of these reports you can export it to a, like an Excel file you can export to a PDF and be armed with some of these great reports to be able to take back and show like your board that to prove the effectiveness of your campaigns. It's all not just about good news it's also about looking at like what might not be working as well so if you're spending some money on advertising or, you know, putting out some efforts on, you know, promoting this either, you know, kind of physically with flyers or banners or things like that or on social media who Google analytics would also be a great place for you to go to see how these things are working you know is that the time you're putting out there really working is it paying off. Is it driving people to where you expect it to so are you running a bunch of social media campaigns driving someone to a donation page, but not getting those that those visits those hits as you would expect. That's what you're going to really, really see as you dive deeper into things like acquisition and engagement. And then we can talk about user flow so you know if you joined us on our on some of our other webinars, more specific to things like, you know, building website or website strategy, you hear us talk a lot about user experience and user flow. And that's how someone is navigating throughout your website so Google calls it like a behavior behavior or behavior flow or behavior flow path. So what's nice in Google Analytics floor is you can kind of like set your ideal path and see how people are traveling through there but you can also see, you know, how someone is is navigating across your site, and the expectations of them across this so in this view you can see where they started so that's that first thing on the left side there and then you'll see where they decay over time so what's the first step. And then they move from like the first page view, which is the homepage, and then they move to like the, let's say, in this example, a, you know, an apparel page, and they might go back to the homepage. This is nice to know where someone comes from and what they're doing when they're when they're navigating your site, but what's really helpful when you're looking at this is planning what you as well looking at your expectation how do you expect someone to use your site, and then that's the way to get them through there more efficiently. We like to keep people know more than one step away from where they're trying to go to when they when they reach that website, we're not for the higher converting pages or the more valuable pages. So I think this is something very powerful and valuable to use when you're planning your navigation or revamping navigation across your website. If you see it's taking someone multiple steps to get to, you know, an important page on your site that's a great that's not for you to move that into the navigation so now they're one step away, or it might even be a prompt to add a call to action or something like that to your homepage or two common pages throughout your site to drive them, you know, one step away from that. In addition to these, these four traffic type these four main traffic types we also have these two other traffic types here that you see on the screen so we have direct traffic. So it also comes to your website when you type in like someone types in a URL. There's organic traffic this is like all the common stuff that was in Google Analytics. Before organic traffic is going to be when someone searches for you and search results. How does, you know, they click on that link in the search results drive your website that that's like an organic traffic organic session. And then there's referral traffic system when somebody comes to your site from another website so if you've got like your link out on somebody else's blog. Sometimes you'll see social media traffic, social media traffic will show up as referral traffic as well. And then there's paid traffic this is stuff that comes through paid advertisements like Google ads or like social media ads or anywhere that they can track like an advertising campaign back to driving that use of your website. Two additional ones now one is display traffic so this is people that have seen a display ad so there's a cookie that shows up with this for tracking good it shows up with that display ad. And then they can say this drove that that session to the website. And the other is just other traffic. So it's like traffic from other sources that we that Google can't categorize or there's not tracking code. It's in there that's a lot that will allow them to see where do they come from so that could be stuff like if they clicked a link in like a PDF document or like a word doc or something like that that you shared it could be things like email campaigns, or other kind of places like that, but it's important to understand, you know, where that we said where that traffic is coming from so what's driving that traffic. This can also be this is a little bit more advanced but this could also be a queue that something might be set up incorrectly you might have incorrect, you know, trap or incorrect tagging across your Google analytics property if you're seeing a lot of direct traffic or referral traffic coming from your own domain. That's usually a queue that something set up incorrectly so it's like misreporting that type of information to you. Sometimes that'll happen like if you have to like a sub domain somewhere or a separate domain that's driving them that's getting long is direct traffic or long is or sorry long as referral traffic, but it really shouldn't be it should still be internal traffic that's one of the nice things you can get set up better through Google analytics for. So as I started to talk through the behavior thing, applying that information you that you glean from knowing where your traffic is coming from and how people are behaving on your website can really help you. Optimize your CTAs your calls to action and understand whether these calls to action are driving traffic to this pages you want them to so calls to action in in digital marketing so in your emails and your, your social media campaigns and your videos that are they driving traffic to the right places and then looking at things like display traffic to understand was there did someone see a call to action in the video not click it but end up on your website. Anyway, and then that gets kind of like lumped back into that display traffic. And then configuration errors others talking about like so are they either getting four or four errors after they view a certain page so if you see someone's kind of going going from home page to another page like maybe a donate page, and you see a bunch of four or four errors after that that can be seen through Google analytics or the configuration error I was talking about where it's incorrectly, giving you know, direct or referral traffic to your existing website your existing URLs. Also help identify if your copywriting is is performing. And are you getting engagement like on their social and email channels, but not seeing that traffic coming back to your website so seeing if it you know you don't have a strong enough reason to drive them there you're not leaving kind of leaving them wanting something more wanting them to learn more by coming up to your website and converting. And so we're going to take a look at user behavior now so web chart website traffic is really helpful for understanding how your website is performing. But sometimes when you're dealing in those large numbers it's hard to you know identify issues that maybe a single user might have. So the numbers may say hey everything's looking okay you know, across the across the site as a whole, but when we really look at how users are interacting with the site that may uncover, you know, either new issues or new opportunities to find, find more information. Or jump right into it. We're going to be talking about events, again. And so, God think about me to the next slide. Yeah. So here is this is really identifying, you know, new insights and how users are interacting with whatever sort of data stream you have set up. So by choosing the right events to track this is going to help you understand exactly what these users are doing. So let's say you have a large resource platform and you want to find out how many people are downloading. You know some of the one sheets you've created or flyers to promote certain events, having them set up you'll be able to see okay here, people are able to get to this page, and they're able to download, you know this resource having that the file download setup is really helpful here. And really if you're trying to figure out in that you know traffic flow that the colleges showed being able to understand if people are on a certain page, are they getting to the you know the the bottom level pages that we want that we might have these specific conversions marked in. So we're talking about the kind of events that we can use to track user behavior. There's a couple that are built in. The first is the automatic events so these are things you just load up Google Google analytics and they're already there so you have the page view, the scroll and video engagement so somebody put you have Google analytics installed and they view a page. No additional configuration is going to show up there. Somebody's you know it's I think it's set to 90% if you're the scroll bar gets to 90% to the length of the page, it's going to mark an event for that, or somebody hits a play on a video that will be automatically configured. And they have some things that breaks out into you know these recommended custom enhanced measurement events. Recommended and enhanced measurements are things that are going to pull in here, and they're going to give you know a lot of additional information here that you might not get or maybe more useful beyond just a simple configuration. If you have a e commerce portion of your site, there's a lot of events that are installed here that allows you to sort of see how people are interacting with the carts, whether they're viewing specific items or anything like that. That requires a little bit more of an advanced configuration, really getting them set up is going to help you in the long run by being able to really understand how people are using that section of your site. And here, the enhanced measurement events, these are things like hey how many times a people clicking a link that takes them out of your website. So it was a good rule of thumb to have you know those things open in a separate tab. So that people you know if they're looking to engage with an external resource, they're able to sort of, you know, have the tab with your website still on there so they don't have to you know hit back, you know you might lose out, you know have that, but maybe you can say hey, we collect a lot of, you know, resources maybe community resources and we direct a lot of traffic to other people. Why don't we sort of see how many times these outbound links are being tracked and be able to sort of report on that. Maybe if you're looking to find a new partner to partner with you'll be able to say hey, we drive this much traffic to our know our external partners on a monthly basis, just give you more data points to to come up with more creative things to do. There are some things you can do to modify specific things say you want to track how many people are downloading specific file. You can create a custom event to say hey, show me every time somebody has done a file download events, but then customized and say and the file is downloaded is our annual report, be able to set that up. There are still some use cases where you're going to want to use a tool at Google Tag Manager that allows you to sort of track buttons by IDs and things like that. But I would imagine as Google Analytics for still kind of you know getting new features and changes every day that that's coming down the line in in my personal opinion. So this may change over time, but the vanilla platform gives you quite a lot of information or right out of the box and allows you to sort of configure some more advanced things as well. So now we're going to take a quick, you know, a look at bounce and exit rates so that these are two separate things and these are really important to understand this is when people stop interacting with your site. So it's not enough to just you know once they make a conversion or you store an event about them, that's helpful information, but you also want to see when people say, I you know I think I've gotten everything I need to get from this organization right now for good or for bad. So bounce rate measures the percentage of single page sessions and exit exit rate measures the percentage of sessions that end on a specific page. So for example bounce rate might be they click on you know Google search result. They see your site, and then they just like look at it and they don't do anything else they don't fill out a form, they don't scroll anywhere, or they can scroll the page but they don't you know click anywhere else there's not a lot of user interaction going on that. So maybe a bounce rate you want those to be low you want once somebody is on your site, you want to have them hooked whether it's with, you know, information calls to action, something like that you want to be able to make sure that you're able to engage your users. Exit rate is really allows you to understand how people, how and where people are interacting with your site and saying okay now I'm done. This is might say a lot of people maybe they're going to end on the thank you cart page if you have any commerce portion of your site, or might say hey after they filled out a event registration. That's the page where they're like okay I'm closing out. That's where you can sort of understand hey maybe we add another call to action on this page a lot of people are ending right here. Maybe we can get them to sign up for a newsletter, maybe we can get them to engage with you know a on demand webinar or something like that, being able to identify what exactly is going to be the areas you don't want to focus on. So it also gives you some information for things that might be wrong, a high bounce rate may indicate a problem with your landing pages, and a high exit rate may indicate you know there's an issue with a specific page and user journey, they might not be going all the way to sign up for them, spend all this time on this nice user journey and people aren't getting past a certain point. This is where able to understand hey this is where motion stopping at me address this. So you can really identify the areas of your website or your app that need optimization that's going to improve your conversion rates. It's going to lead us right into conversions. So events are the the main building blocks, and this is really going to turn into conversions quite easily so on a simple level, a conversion is just a special kind of events. You can mark any any sort of event you'd like as a conversion whether that's a farm submission that might be one, it may be hitting play on a webinar you've posted on there. If you're just downloading a sheet, whatever you'd like, be able to set that as a conversion, and that gives you a easier way to view the most valuable user interaction on the site. So because everything in Google Analytics for is now an events that just gives you more opportunities to turn more things into conversions, you're trying to raise just an awareness campaign. Maybe you would even consider scrolling to the bottom of a page or conversion may not be the most accurate or helpful conversion for you. So Google Analytics for is going to allow you to do so. So just figuring out what's going to be the the most impactful information to share to usually going to be for people outside the marketing department maybe a board, or you know executive director or something like that being able to understand. Hey, here's all the, all the people that we've been able to interact with. Here's the high level conversions we've identified. And here's how many of these generate a weekly monthly basis something like that. It's a quick half time so we just thrown a lot of information at you, and definitely compared to universal analytics the old version of Google Analytics, quite a lot is different and there's really just a fundamental change in the way that Google Analytics is handling things. The complexity of this platform is directly tied to its usefulness. So the changes they made gives more opportunities to understand data in a simplified way, if you can believe it. But that does not sort of reduce the fact that there is a lot to learn. So, whether it's, you know, doing learning engagements like you are right now, or working with professional, there's quite a lot that can be done with inside the platform. But don't feel discouraged. Some of the stuff starts to become, you know, a second nature as we, as we move on. So we're going to jump into, rather than just explaining how this works, we're going to look at two use cases for how you might want to integrate Google Analytics, we're going to take a look at measuring fund raising campaigns and tracking marketing campaign. So there's going to be a lot that share between these two, but these just might be use cases to say, hey, these are two of the things we're really trying to focus on, how can we best use Google Analytics to help increase the effectiveness of this. So in order to do that, one thing before I pass it off to Kyle, I want to highlight is UTM parameters. So these are urgent tracking mechanisms. I can't remember what the M is. I always call them UTM things. But this basically allows you to pass information into Google Analytics. So there's a couple kinds here, you can take a look at these. But on a very basic level, this allows you to append special information to the back end of your links that will then filter into Google Analytics. So, you know, say we're talking about one of those fundraising campaigns that's coming up next might put a campaign name here for spring 2023 fundraising. And then you'll be able to go into Google Analytics and see, okay, here's all the traffic that originated from this specific link, here's where they came from in an email. So you can start to have things in campaign, you can have multiple, you know, different sources in here, you can really fill these out and this is something you don't need to set up in Google Analytics itself. If you just send a link with this UTM parameters on the end, it's going to pass into Google Analytics automatically. So these are really helpful ways, especially if you're doing a lot of like marketing, maybe you have a lot of like, like a street team, and they're handing out, you know, cards you can have and just maybe in a QR code, you can bet a lot of these UTM parameters, then understand exactly how well your street team cards are doing. Or say you have, you know, something in an email, and you want to say, hey, this is the bottom button on the email and this is the top button. So if you're driving more, more information to the website, you can add UTM parameters to those that'll pass directly along into Google Analytics. Yeah, so how do we measure the success of these fundraising campaigns so kind of real world examples, more specific examples. First step is to set up your events. So making sure your donation landing page and your forms are all set up in GA for Google Analytics for so they get marked as conversions. So go through, get the event set up once you've got those pages in place, drop these pages and drop the forms in there and get that set up so that you can start creating your reports. Get them created so that you can easily get weekly updates and you can subscribe these updates as well. And it's helpful as I started mentioning earlier, for things like sharing this with your board, or sharing this with, you know, someone that little bit higher up in the company or to go after some go after more budget for advertising. We want to make sure you have your all that material tagged so as Julie just mentioned using those UTM parameters a lot of times this some of this stuff will get injected automatically so if you copy something from like Facebook link or something like that it will automatically it will start to append some of these things to it if you use tracking codes from common systems, it will allow you to add that so if you use something like MailChamp or HubSpot. It will add certain UTM tags or just make sure that you're you've got those right tags and tracking those things are set up as part of your reporting. And that's really super helpful to see, you know where these people are coming from and how these efforts are paying off, and then start using that data that you're you're seeing from the behavior flow from from the where they're coming from from the different sources and channels they're coming from, and the scroll events to see your conversion rates so that you can make changes on the website, and then prior to them coming to that website that landing page. This is also a good opportunity for you to address like any user experience issues, get more granular we really recommend looking at how, how traffic comes and how behavior changes across different devices you might see that you have a big drop off when it's on desktop. And that's sometimes a cue that either the page layout doesn't render correctly on desktop or more vice versa on mobile, or maybe there is an error with with, you know, one of the engagements or something like that, all one of those devices so you look for those to be cues to say that something might not be working as expected, but also look for cues to see things are you know overperforming, and then apply that to, you know, future campaigns or other pages across your site. Track the success of these marketing campaigns so I started to talk about this started to talk through this but you know we're driving people to this these fundraising pages, or two other campaigns. We can use Google Analytics for as I was mentioned earlier to start tracking how that marketing is working so having that consistent tagging. And for MailChamp or HubSpot, you know, not having disjointed tags if there's a campaign name that's used throughout MailChamp maybe through one of your subscriptions or maybe through a list. Carrying that consistent tagging through is going to help show, you know, which different source they might have come from so they might have come from a MailChamp email, or they might have come from like a Facebook post or whatever but ensuring we have the same tag across all those campaigns is going to help you track the effectiveness and then the granularity of the different efforts you're putting out there. You can do this by setting up a funnel report so use that user journey to just build out a specific funnel report and see how people filter from, you know, new users to conversions but see where they're entering that funnel from. And then tagging your call to actions as a conversion so that same way we talked about tagging things on forms for fundraising, tagging a, you know, a button click or a form submission or clicking on an email address or a link, or something that's going to drive them to like a third party site to register for an event or sign up to be a volunteer. Make sure you do tag that as a conversion will show kind of the full funnel and show you know how well something works how well user flow works as people navigate throughout your site and live across your marketing ecosystem. So some key takeaways from today before we start to jump into some questions. First thing Google Alex is free Google Alex for is free. It's a powerful tool really help you understand what's working how people are using your site how they're working using your apps your as Julian mentioned things like your LMS and how they're interacting with you across your entire kind of marketing ecosystem and your different your different materials. If you use it effectively. It'll allow you to make data driven decisions. So you can increase effectiveness and efficiency across these efforts, and not just on like your website so don't think of it just as how's my website working it's really. How is everything working my website being sort of the bottom of the funnel for those those tactics. The cover is basic information at a glance like we mentioned so easy very easy to get set up very easy to start tracking things but then you can get very granular and do more complex reporting arms and some some, you know, some specifics on for your organization or your different causes or that whatever your marketing efforts and things like that might be. Before we jump into questions just just want to quickly cover this maybe this answer a lot of the questions I've seen throughout the chat. First and foremost, this is this one as we mentioned this is this was recorded. We will share a copy of this recording as well as the copy of this deck the PDF with all of you afterwards so if you all join late that's there for you as well. So any questions on, you know, how can you help or you know how can I get help with these have some specific questions answered. We have a number of offerings on tech soup that that are very much addressed to those question or will address those questions, but very specific also to Google Analytics, Google Analytics, including a migration from universal to Google Analytics for that can all be just websites you just go to their main page or one of their or any page that's got the navigation on it and you'll see services drop down you can select website services or digital marketing, you should find those there will also include links to those in the follow up to this presentation. One of the things that we found that works really well across nonprofit organizations is our website maintenance service. This is really just partner, having a partner to keep your website running smoothly. So you don't have to really think about it kind of can be very hands off, but you will have a dedicated account manager to field incoming field requests from your organization. So if you're like helping you answer questions on your Google Analytics, it can be things like making sure that we're setting up, you know, conversions events things like that in your Google Analytics account or it can be stuff like, you know, changing images uploading blog posts, probably shooting errors, things like that across your website. So, as we said, we'll share links to this easiest way to get started with us or to have some questions answer would just be to book a consultation so following this you'll have links to that that links right here on the website services on this PDF. And now we'll open up for some questions so got quite a few to go through here in the chat and in the Q&A. So I think we'll just get started. I don't know if you want to pick one out. I think some of them are similar. I'll just sort of start from some of the first ones that were answered. You know, Mark and Adriana are asking about, you know, if you have a platform or your website, if that affects anything if you're trying to do multiple things. So for Mark for your question directly he asks is, you have a website hosted by a particular provider, can Google Analytics to work with any hosting provider. So with hosting, just a little bit of a nomenclature thing that tends to be for server based websites but if you talk about platforms like Squarespace or Rick's or something like that. Google Analytics is going to work with any of them. So they don't necessarily care what your website is built with you could be coding it on you know notepad on your computer. So I'm just being served out to the internet. That's where it can address on the various ways that Google Analytics is going to integrate with the website is going to change depending on which no website provider use. But there should be options to integrate in any way. The only limitation you might have is if you know depending if you have a very basic website bill you might not be able to add some of the, you know, specific button tags or maybe just configure a little bit differently but 99% of the things and Google Analytics is going to work, you know, across any actual website platform for Adrian's question you have a main site and a sister sites. Are you saying to use one code or add each for each site. So you're going to have one property, and that you're going to have your main account and then a Google Analytics property and within that property, you're going to want to set up two data streams one data stream for each each website one for the main one for the sister. Those are going to filter into the same Google Analytics property, and you'll be able to see the website data together. Omar asks that 30 minutes of being idle and returning to the browser, or will the system count that as two different sessions on a basic level. Yes, there are some caveats to that and that really depends on some sort of advanced configurations, but on a very basic level. Yes, that will count as two different sessions. And Marie has as two in here, many good online video resources that go more into the details of each of the tabs and Google Analytics. This is a bit tricky because Google Analytics for has been in development basically for for a couple years now. There's a lot of video content out there, but also you know this information is changing fairly quickly. So it's going to be a matter of finding the most up to date information. There, there is a lot of stuff out there. None that's sort of I think stands above any of the rest right now, but just sort of as new information comes out Google itself also offers a very robust sort of documentation platform that will always give you the most up to date information for how to do things that sort of goes into the next question is our one on one training we can request for help with Google Analytics. Yes, there is definitely sort of reach out to us we can either help you migrate or just talk through some examples or figure out how your websites is going to work with Google Analytics. Another one here how do you track a conversion that goes through QR code. Great question says something where UTM parameters are going to be really helpful. So one of the downsides of UTM parameters is it takes a, a website URL Google.com slash Julian, and it adds a question mark UTM underscore campaign all this stuff. And with that sort of it's hard to maybe print it out with, you can either use a URL shortener like a bitly or some organizations even by their own domains to create their own URL shorteners, but with the QR code is all packaged up in that dot matrix. They say hey we're going to append all that all these UTM tags say this is you know this flyer this is sort of the, the name of the flyer this is sort of the time we're sending out all that stuff. You're able to put all that into UTM parameters and then when somebody scans that with their phone will, it will then put all that information into Google Analytics and so we'll be able to see all of that right there. Okay, an anonymous question we have. You just add slash UTM source to the end of an HTML link, very close, but not quite. So it's not going to be a slash UTM source UTM campaign anything like that. It's going to come after a question mark. So question marks are like additional bits of information you can you know send to your website for how people are interacting with it. Sometimes you might see in site search you know you type something into a search bar and it reloads the page with a question mark in your search query. You're going to want to use a tool to build these out you can type out everything you know manually, but there is a tool is from GA dev tools. So it's built by Google that'll help you sort of create this. So you'll put in your your main URL where you want to send somebody and they'll say, what's the campaign name will type that in what's what's the, you know the source. This is going in an email doing this, you will type that all out and it will give you a link at the end, and then that way you can sort of paste that in. Finally, Tilly here asks, can you talk to the process of moving from universal analytics to Google analytics for this data copy across. It's a bit of a complex question, some configuration things copy across, not all data data is from universal So it's going to stop collecting data on July 1 or if you remove sort of the universal analytics tag before then I'll stop collecting data there. It will always be available to to report on and see that information there. GA for is going to start collecting new data is hard to sort of get those two to talk to each other not impossible but a little more difficult, just because of the way they're collecting data that the Google analytics for being event based that really changes the way things are looking so it's no longer just a page view. It's a page view event. So there's a lot of caveats that that I don't think we can really get into now, but it is sort of on a very basic level. Google sort of walk you through a wizard to change your UA property into a GA 401. It's just a matter of how exactly that's going to integrate best with any individual configuration. Kathy asks, I'm not using anything fancy on my Google analytics. Now, what is the minimum I need to do to use GA for will the preset reports be available automatically once she for is installed. I'll answer that in reverse. The preset reports will be available automatically, you'll have sort of an Explorer tab and a reports tab set up there, depending on the option you set up if using a wizard to set it up. It will show you slightly different views on that sidebar, but on the on the most part it will give you that information there. I'm just go down here and in terms of, you know, the minimum to get things set up. I would say that the easiest place say you're using a WordPress site, Google makes a plugin called Google site kit that allow you to sort of connect everything to your site right away. And it'll walk you through setting it up and then also get integrated in your site very well for websites that maybe you're using a Wix or a square space or a difference or maybe a landing page tool. You're going to want to start on the Google analytics side and create your property there. And then it's going to give you two pieces of code to put in your site's header. So as long as you're able to access the header of your site or inject, you know, a script somewhere, you'll be able to integrate it there. And that'll just get the data flowing into there and you can turn on the specific events and stuff you want in there. But once that data is in there, you'll have the information and then that's sort of the technical setup side I mentioned in the beginning. The strategic side where you're getting, you know, your customer reporting saying things as conversions, maybe advanced events, things like that. Those are things you can do afterwards, but on a very basic level, just getting the data stream set up and then getting the actual code inserted onto your site. And that's all the ones we have to the QA portion right now. I'm looking just in the, in the chat section pulling some things up here. Could you show how to access create the behavior flow path and or path exploration report that you show? Yeah, that's going to be in the Explorer. And then I believe it's free form. It's basically going to have a report that says path explorations could be one of your main options available. That's going to pull up, you know, all your pages. So you start with an event. That's one of the main differences between universal analytics and Google Analytics 4 is before you might start with the page view and then you track events all in that. With this, you have to start with an event and specify, hey, we want to look at all page view events, and then how people are interacting with the pages after that. But just the path exploration tool inside of the Explorer option is going to get you right there. And how you create events. That's going to be when you're on Google Analytics in the bottom left hand corner, you're going to see a gear. And that's where you're going to spend a lot of time during your setup in that gear section. You're going to be creating the properties, setting up your data streams. And in there, you'll be able to say, okay, look at all our events, create custom events or modify existing ones. And then drop down in the second column you see. I mean, then from there, you know, in the tab just below that you'll be able to mark some of those custom events as conversions and so on a very basic level, the gear icon in the bottom left hand corner. Yep. And Kyle put that that UTM builder in the chat that's going to be very helpful. And once you have Google Analytics setup, you can sort of use this tool and just start creating links. It's going to give you some uniformity across all the things you're creating, but that's you don't need any additional configuration on the, on the Google Analytics side just people are visiting links that stuff, you can put it into. It'll grow directly into Google Analytics. And we'll campaign URL builder work for universal analytics. We need to put the link in header, or just a campaign link. So the campaign URL builder will work in universal analytics, you'll be able to see the way you're going to view the information is going to be a little bit different. And it is going to stop on July 1. I'll just give you that caveat. But then do you need to put it in the header or just the campaign link. So with that campaign builder, you don't need to do any additional configuration once you have Google Analytics setup. That's just going to be, you know, adding extra information onto a link. So say you're you're writing an email and you have your call to action at the bottom maybe to your donate page. Instead of just putting your URL slash donate, you'll be able to put in that that longer link, and then that'll pass all that information directly into the platform. All right. I think that sort of gets us caught up with questions. Anything else for today. That was a great join. Usually the one that talks a lot. Going through all that. As Julian mentioned, you know, happy to walk you all through these different things will follow up you'll have our access to a form or to reach out to us directly to request more information or a consultation on Google Analytics or the website stuff as a whole. But a lot. I think this this, I appreciate everybody joining us today. It's really meant to be kind of high level to give you an idea of like how to scratch the surface and where to start from. But there's a number of resources available directly through tech soup. I would start with like the blog and we can share some in the FOP email as well to dive a little bit deeper into you know Google Analytics getting it set up and customizing it for your specific use cases. Great. Thank you everyone. Have a good rest of your day.