 Okay, that's kind of intuitive. Hello, thank you for coming to this talk. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Andrew Malus. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Calamuna, which is an agency based in Oakland, California. We'll be getting that a little bit later. But first, I just wanted to share with you why I'm here, why this problem matters and sort of where I'm coming from. Way back in the day, oh, fantastic, great timing. There we go. Also, the subway is not running north-south right now, yeah. I'm glad I got here. So back in the day, if you wanted to share analytics data with stakeholders, you could do, and you still can do this wonderful exporting of information from Google Analytics as a PDF. You can attach it to an email. You can send it to them. You're effectively delivering lag metrics because everything from the point of delivery to the present is absent from this report. You send one of these reports and then you wait a month, you send another one and then you wait another month, you send another one. And then what is that person left doing when they wanna get a bigger picture of how their website is behaving? They're sorting through emails and opening up multiple PDFs and comparing things. Seems kind of ridiculous, but this is what we did because, well, the analytics UI is daunting and you don't really wanna send someone there because you value their sanity. Google keeps changing its user interface and its logo. It's really, it's great. Everything is in beta forever and it's fantastic to be innovating but for senior stakeholders and C-suite decision makers, it's really important that there's stability in the information that they're getting. Well, that problem in part is solved with a new product, relatively new product called Google Data Studio that I'm gonna talk a little bit about today. But I don't wanna make this completely a pitch for Google. I'm also going to be speaking about some other dashboarding solutions. I'm gonna speak more broadly as to why this problem is important and how we can address it and talk a little bit about the nature of analytics as well because the application of a concept is only as powerful as their understanding of that concept. I like to think of Data Studio as analytics meets PowerPoint. It allows you to take what normally you would see in this interface, save all the navigation and reorganize the reports into essentially like a slideshow. So you can take all of those same widgets, put just the ones you want onto a slide or a series of slides. And this presents a lot of advantages. First, you can report on multiple websites at the same time which is more difficult to do in one analytics view so you could build a slide with reports on like three or four different websites. That's kind of impossible to achieve otherwise. But mainly it becomes a tool that's really much more easy to digest. If you stick around till the end of this talk, I will be giving away something for free to all lucky members in this audience. I introduced myself earlier but I'd like to introduce Calamuna to you if you don't know us already. We are a mission-driven organization. We work with non-profits, institutions, all kinds of innovative organizations to help make the world a better place and to drive their mission forward through the use of technology, strategy, and design. We're based in Oakland, California. However, the majority of our team is distributed. Two of our company directors are here in Toronto where I was born, which I still hold very dear to my heart which is one reason why I very much want to encourage the growth of the Drupal community here and why as an agency we sponsored this event. Also, we really enjoy sharing. Knowledge should be free and it's really, I think, appropriate to be having this event in a library. I'm enjoying this. I have fond memories of the Reference Library. It's really, I have a slight fear of heights in that like I always want to jump off of tall things but never do and this library just kind of brings up a lot of those feelings in my belly. In less, still quite interesting architectural spaces like the United Nations or the Bay Area Drupal Camp we give talks and like this one, we also are really committed to organizing events like this in our own right and in activating the community. In, to celebrate the demise of Drupal 6, we organized a New Orleans jazz style funeral at Drupal Con a couple years ago that was complete with a ceremonial casket in which we consumed a Drupal shaped cupcakes. Dries gave a talk as well as some others from other Drupal luminaries from around the globe. And it was a very emotional event for many of us who'd worked on Drupal for many years. Drupal 6 for a lot of agencies and individuals signaled the professionalization of Drupal in a lot of ways and became a platform that we had been supporting and working on for quite some time. So it was, yeah, it was really nice. We're also keen to find new ways and new paradigms to interact with our constituents. We recently have been transforming our booth presence at events at Drupal Con and Bad Camp to promote other forms of interaction instead of putting a bunch of money into t-shirts or keychains and landfill. We decided a few years ago we'd start giving our money away to charity instead and actually not just any charity but the charities that individuals at the conference were interested in contributing to. And we did this for a couple of reasons. We wanted to help foster communication and storytelling and understand why people were here because we're ultimately here at a technical conference to learn about how to do things but it's all at the service of a cause and that's really, I think, important to remember and something that we want to bring to the forefront of our communication because it's really who we are and why we do things. So individuals would decide I want to give to EFF or to Creative Commons and they'd fill a little square in the beginning. Everything was just sort of brayscale and built up over time and created the testament and greater awareness within the community of all these different causes that people really cared about and that was really interesting to see. So it was like, oh, what do these guys do? And people would talk, we would talk with them and it was really meaningful. We're always seeking meaning. We work with a number of institutional partners in higher education, some of which are on this slide, a lot of nonprofits as well. Now, if you don't have this particular color set and your logo will still work with you, Zen Center is a testament to that. I don't know why everyone's got to say it gets some creativity going. We do a little bit of logo design too. So we're doing some work. We launched a really great site a couple of weeks ago for the De Young Museum. If you want to check that out, it's at insights.famsf.org, I believe. It's for LaPros. It's a beautiful website which is entirely built in Cala Static, which is a prototyping framework that we've developed and put together. My colleague, Crispin, spoke about earlier today. It will show you the full power of what you can realize in a purely static context. We're in the process of figuring out a new backend that's going to power that. We're evaluating some options and we know that we'll be able to consume whatever it is because it feels like Drupal's a little bit too heavy for essentially what are very complex and beautiful, but single-page websites. Anyhow, we're here to talk about analytics. What is the problem that we're trying to solve? Well, for us as an organization, we want to do meaningful work. We want to do good, right? But how do we know, right? We like the product that we've made. We've made a beautiful website. The client is happy, like we're happy. Happiness is fantastic, but we're building a website for end users. And if they have particular sets of goals and objectives, we want to make sure that they're able to achieve them. We don't have the benefit of always getting them in the room, so we want to be able to measure those things. We want to be able to measure them so we can achieve greater and better outcomes and we can iterate towards those ends. And really, we want to make sure that we're measuring the right things because our eyes should be on the prize. Lastly, we want to visualize those outcomes so that we can tell a story and that that story can power action and informed decisions. I got particularly interested in the power of visualization a number of years ago when I went to New York for Occupy. I worked to help power some of the technology infrastructure behind the movement. We built a visualization of all the different occupations that were happening throughout the globe, including some other like movements that weren't necessarily labeled Occupy. But we wanted to show the power of an idea and how it could cross borders. So we built a map that eliminated those borders and focused a lot more on the connections and on the beacons of light that were shining throughout the globe. And I learned how powerful this visualization was and how this data became for individuals in middle America who were alone in their small town with their ideas holding steadfast to try to build a better world and how connected they felt to everything else that was going on around them because of this. The data was exportable as well and ended up powering some research from UC Berkeley, which was really interesting to see. Sometimes you don't know how much reach the projects that you work on have, so it's kind of delightful. I want to talk a little bit more broadly about analytics because analytics aren't, isn't just not owned by Google. Analytics is a concept and it's a practice and it really involves taking information, measuring it, analyzing it and interpreting it and presenting it back so that in our case, when we're talking about digital analytics in particular, we can use that information to inform user behavior and we do that on all kinds of different applications. Some examples of analytics. This is a Google Analytics tool. It is an overlay. There's a Chrome plugin that you can get, which is free, of course, like most Google things. And it will create an overlay on your website and show you where your links are clicked. Of all the links on the page, which add up to 100%, they get divided across all the different links and you can see which ones are more popular. In this case, we were doing some analysis on a university website. They were motivated to get people to donate. They had created these buttons, make a gift that no one was clicking on because they were poorly designed and this is a really powerful way of illustrating that in a rather intuitive manner. So we've taken information, it's presented, and it's motivating some action to redesign a button or think about a new paradigm for donations, which probably shouldn't be jammed up in the text over there. Analytics as well can mean, in this case, tracking how users are interacting with the website. This analysis looks at, uses a tool called Hotjar. There's also Crazy Egg. These are heat mapping tools and there are three forms that this takes. One on the right is a scroll map that just shows how much time people spend on which part of the whole page. Some people don't scroll all the way to the bottom. It gets cooler. At the top, people spend more time, it's warmer. Now from that, people are clicking on things. They're thinking about clicking on things. Their mouths are sort of moving and hovering and that's meaningful too. It's not just about clicks. Intent is what is it, three quarters of the law or something. We can see here that very few people are clicking down on the social media icons that everyone wants in the footer of their website because they are always used. And the navigation's certainly popular but you see there's a lot of hovering. They're going all the way down to the bottom. There's a lot of action in the footer. Not many clicks. The top one's being clicked, the rest not so much. So people are really like looking for things. You start to paint a picture of how your eye is really being interacted with. In this case, four clients took some patient data that they had, got all of that data normalized, it brought it into a spreadsheet and pushed that spreadsheet out to map. Did some reverse, so we had addresses. Did some reverse IP lookups based on those addresses. Not reverse IP, reverse geocoding. Got some lat lawns and put that through a map powered by Mapbox that created some density that let them visualize where everyone was coming from. Although they were a San Francisco-based institution, there were dots spread out all over the place and it really started to paint a picture because, well, this was for clinical practice at UCSF and it really just showed that a lot of people hadn't changed their home address and still had their parents' address in there. And so suddenly it showed that their data was maybe not exactly as expected and that's part of the power of visualizing things. There are some surprises that you can find. In this case, we did surveys. Google is not able to get all the information you want. It has a very specific use case. And so we did some surveys and we plotted that information across a graph space asking individuals how often they visited the website to understand audiences. There are ways you can segment your audiences in your website to get this kind of information out of analytics, either through opt-in or other means, but generally it's not information that's readily available to you. So what we found here was that there's an inversely proportional relationship in terms of how much time, how often people visit the website if they're an undergrad to a faculty member. And this analysis some opportunities, again for audience segmentation and a greater awareness of when we're trying to disseminate information, like when eyeballs, what kind of eyeballs will be hitting it at what time. And so doing this early on in a redesign process or process of reconsidering the website can be greatly informative and strongly encourage any practitioner to dive as deeply as time permits into analysis and research and so you can measure twice and cut once. Ultimately we're looking to have a greater impact in analytics is really all about that. It's about helping you figure out what works and what doesn't so that you can make more informed decisions. Any questions or thoughts anyone wants to contribute before I dive a little bit more deeply into dashboards, which is sort of the meat of this stock? What's the common sense that you're in for a short time? I think it's called analytics. It's like a Google analytics. If you just, I'll get that for you at the end. It's you install, like you install a thing and then it's just there, right? So I don't remember the name, sorry. So Google Data Studio, what is Google Data Studio? First, how many people have heard of Google Data Studio in this room? Okay, great. How many people have actually used it? Okay, about half of those that have heard about it. It's not that old, but it's quite old. In UNIX time, in 2006 it became a public beta. And I like analytics because it's really easy to share. It's as easy to share a report as it is any other Google document, spreadsheet or Google presentation. But it also presents dynamic information. So within that report, it's not like a screenshot. It's not a GIF or a ping that's like fixed in time. You can interact with the data in the same way that you can interact with all of those charts in analytics by hovering on things, but also by filtering that data. In this case, this report allows you to go and filter the data to see the difference between in voter sentiment for Trump, between male and female voters. Now already this data is extremely bias in a binary data set, so I wouldn't trust it implicitly, but it does speak to the ability to create some more dynamism in your reports. It also has some features that will allow you to customize those reports and design them. I think this is really powerful for not only agencies, but for institutions as well. So once you start to color your graphs and add some of the fonts and colors that are on brand, it starts to speak a little bit more to your control and ownership of your own information. And that's, I think, important from a political standpoint and also for morale. So you can put together a little something like this slide, which I showed earlier. I'm gonna switch now. All right, so I'm gonna show you guys a little bit of what can be done. First, I'm gonna flip over to this template that we put together. This is that free thing that I'll be sending a link out to in a slide that you can download. To give you a head start, we put together a basic template that has, it's a little generic. You wanna make sure that you're putting reports together that are focused more on your key performance indicators. These are some of the more common data points that most websites are tracking. So this is a multi-page report. You can see we're on the first page. This is an actual Google Data Studio report. And I can interact with the parts and customize them. If I go into the view mode, then you can see that the data is all interactive. There's also this handy little date filter, which is fantastic. You're no longer needing to send reports every month or however periodic period you use. You can go in at any point, customize and tailor this report or any other dimensions you wish to expose to your stakeholders to narrow that information down and apply filters in the same way that you would inside of Google Analytics. So here is this first page. Here's another page, which we already saw in the presentation, so I'll skip that one. And you can get all these little charts and I won't dive too too deep into how to make all the little, widget-y bits. It takes a little while to wrap your head around it and I think the best way to do it, maybe is the way that I learned Drupal is you take it and then you try to break it. You move things around, you copy things, you modify them. So I'm hoping that you'll take this template and use it as maybe a playground for you. But what I am interested in showing you is some of the other stuff that you can do with Data Studio that you can't do with straight up Google Analytics. Because you have access to all these widgets, but you can tie them to other data sources. So you're not only needing to feed Google Analytics into Data Studio, you can use it to connect to other kinds of data sources. And people have built connectors, which I'll talk about in a minute. Here's one to Twitter. So this report takes all mentions of Calamuna that are on Twitter and will come in and report on them here. So if you tweet Calamuna, it will show up in this report as we speak. There are ways that you can filter this data to be more meaningful to you if you do so choose. So here, for example, I am not that interested in anyone that's talking about Calamuna that isn't us, so I might apply a filter to this data, which will come up here, edit this. So here I can exclude anyone who doesn't have, whose screen name doesn't equal Calamuna. So there's a little bit that you can do within Analytics to customize your reports. And this is pretty nifty. You can also normalize data. I think this is a pretty powerful feature. Sometimes your data sets are not so clean. I'll remove this filter here. Sometimes your data sets aren't so clean. With Twitter, the information that you get in regards to people's user location is just a text string. And people might write whatever in there. And so you're not able to then cluster that information to understand who's tweeting about you from where necessarily, at least if you're using the raw data. So you can take any fields from any data set and create a new field that then you can apply some programmatic analysis to. It's a little hard to read. I'll flip over to my slide, which is bigger. So in this case, I wanted to say, well anyone who's from San Francisco Bay Area or Stanford.ca, or Stanford, California, sorry, or San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Sacramento, Berkeley, like everyone is then local. And so that will just give me a yep or a nope and additional view on things. You can also do some pretty cool stuff with other kinds of data sources like MySQL. So you can connect Data Studio to, by my modal, to your Drupal database and then plot or get a little table of information here. In this case, I'm just looking at the node table. We get a list of the latest blog posts and the date. It's still early days for the MySQL connector. Like you can't really do joins, which doesn't let you do a whole lot with the information, but they're getting there. There's an open issue for that at which point you'll be able to report a lot more on things. And the neat thing here is then you can take this information that you're getting from your Drupal site and map that along with maybe some other information that you're getting from analytics or other sources. But you're not limited to, yes sir. Fantastic question. Here is my next slide. There are other connectors that will allow you to plug into analytic sources. So this is just one, the connector gallery launched on April 5th of this year. And one of those sources is the Google BigQuery. They do have other search and source backends. There's Postgres, they're supported. And I don't know specifically for Elasticsearch, but that would be something you could search the gallery for. What I find particularly interesting and useful are Google Sheets integration because with any, you can, even though they may not have connectors for every single system, you can generally export everything like as a CSV. And once you have that, then you can use that data to create some other information, informational graphs, such as this one. This is, so once you set up your spreadsheet like this, you wanna use these paradigms of dimensions and metrics, which are analytics principles that are applied inside of Data Studio. And then you can select from that, once you connect to your spreadsheets, you can select those dimensions and metrics to plot them. Here is one example of, I think, a fairly successful example of data that examines the wage gap between ethnicities and gender, still too far between those two things. But kind of, I think, certainly very nifty, a nifty way of being able to bring a lot of different information together from analytics and other sources. And this just connects to a spreadsheet and some research. Cool. Any questions so far? Or more questions? Yeah. So the connectors are generally authored by third parties. Those third parties are like other vendors that are trying, I think, to get you a taste of what they can do more of for you if you pay them. The Twitter integration is fairly basic. It doesn't have all of the features that I would like to see. Facebook, there are Facebook ad connectors, but it's, you know, the amount of integration with Facebook is not as strong. I'll talk about some other tools that integrate a little bit better with those sources. Is there a more tightly bound? And it's still, again, early days since in April that gallery was launched. My sense is that Google approached a few different people and were like, hey, can you build some connectors to populate this gallery so it's not just us? And they were like, sure, no problem. And they made something happen. They're all of these connect, the connectors are, everything is documented. There's an API, there's, you can build your own connectors if you want to for your data sources and decide whether or not you want to put them, you know, inside of the community space, but it is as powerful, you know, as you want it to be for you. Here's a quick link to the template that we have if you want to download it. Just go to bit.ly slash gds dash dn18, that's Drupal North 18. That's a hyphen, not an m dash or an n dash for any other type of files. I'll put this slide up again later if you don't have time to grab it. I want to talk about some other options that are available to you. These are popular ones. There are others. Power BI is one that's more popular in the Microsoft communities. I'll show you an example of their types of dashboards. Tableau as well. Data box, I'll spend a little bit more time on. I do have to like their product and I think you can do quite a lot with them in the free tier. So, Data box, they have a template library. There are some templates available as well on Google Data Studio, not a ton, but they give you like a pretty good starting point. Here's one example of an analytics dashboard and you can go in and customize the colors and the widgets and the data and like you can put different data sources in the same report the same way that you can with Google Data Studio. But one thing that I think is really the killer feature for Data box is that it's responsive. The slide approach that Google Data Studio expresses give you a couple options. It's like eight and a half by 11 or 69 and they're not resizable. This is completely responsive, which means you can put on any screen size on your mobile device or you can use Data box has also got this feature that lets you build these sort of like rotating slide shows. So you can take a screen inside of the room, you can put a slide show up and then it'll just kind of like cycle through things. It's powerful. It can connect to sources like QuickBooks and you can use that information to track like how far along you are in your donation and your donations. It can connect to your CRM and you can track campaigns. You can build a sort of like little peace room scenario where everyone is getting like more motivated by data in a real time manner. I think that's quite powerful. You know, like maybe it's, okay, so say like it's like Friday, right? And you're working on some campaign and you're like, oh man, we're really gonna make our target and we still need to raise this much money. And then like you just like you leave at the end of the day and you're like spending the whole weekend worrying about this and you come back on Monday morning and it turns out that some anonymous donor gave like a fairly substantial amount on like Friday at like 4 p.m., right? And no one would have seen this because you're the person who checks your analytics and reports back to you. It's just like they were doing something else with this sort of report report then like maybe the whole team could be informed more quickly, leave the office or you know, on a really high note, be really peppy for the whole weekend, come back like with a new form of energy. I think that's powerful, right? So segment, I'll talk about later, sorry, slide was residual. Here's a Power BI dashboard. I haven't personally used the tool very much. I grabbed this off the internet. It looks very similar to the kinds of things that you can build in those other spaces. The pricing model is decent at a small scale and I've heard good things about it. So it's another option for you to explore. It has more power than Google Data Studio. But again, Google Data Studio is free. And if you're only looking to present your analytics in a different way, great. This lets you do a lot more connection between different data sources as well. And so that you can correlate some of your information that you wouldn't get necessarily just straight out of one source. Tableau is also very, very popular. It's super popular with data scientists, with large, I think that disaster recovery community uses it substantially as well. And you can build a lot of fancy reports. There are many specialists out there for Tableau. The pricing model is more expensive. However, I think they have like a non-profit tier. I haven't explored it substantially yet, but I've talked to many people that have used it and they're very pleased with it. I wanted to also give a brief shout out to Segment, which is an organization based in San Francisco. They write some really good tech. One of their projects is called Metalsmith. It's a static site generator. We use it to power a calisthenic. But the core of Segment's model is that they're a connector. They're a single API for all of your different data sources. So instead of installing Google Analytics on your website directly, you install Segment and then you go into the Segment dashboard and then you enable Google Analytics. It's similar to what you would use with Google, it's similar to Google Tag Manager. If anyone uses that or if you don't, your institution would highly recommend it. It's very flexible and allows you to go in and change parameters without pushing any code to your website. You just go and do that in a third party interface. Allows marketers to have a lot more control. But in this case, they have an API, like an analytics API, and those calls are more generic. And there is sort of a middleware where they'll broker that call back out to the different endpoint and get that information in whatever terms that particular product uses. So why is that interesting? Well, I think it's interesting because it gives you flexibility in how many of these integrations you can throw onto your website. Installing all of these scripts, installing like a heat map tracking tool, like it can be expensive, right? You just want it on for a little, for a hot minute, no pun intended, and you push it out there. But it stays on longer because it takes someone time to pull it back down again. Well, you can just go in and turn it on and back off again inside of that space. But you can also freely turn on like 12 other tools because it's really only making a single call via the API for this kind of information. Then you can evaluate those different products. They've pushed a lot of those products to open up their practices to have 30 day free demos. I don't know about you, but like I hear about some tool, I go to their website and I can't figure out what the heck they do or how much it costs because they all want me to call sales rep to schedule a demo. I can't schedule like 40 demos, like it just doesn't make sense. But I can go in, I can click like a bunch of boxes, I can see how they work. Because they're a middleware, they have that information and all those calls inside of a data warehouse, which means you can replay your data on different sources. So if you want to switch out of Google Analytics, your data is kind of held hostage by Google. You can export it, sure, but you can't really use it and if you've ever looked at an export of all of that information, it's insane, you've got like 7,000 files. It's like unusable. But now like you can replay your history. So when you turn a service on, you're not starting from scratch and waiting over time for that data to roll in, it's just gonna replay all of that information. And that data that you have, that data that's warehouse, you can push it to a bucket or it's yours, like they're not holding on to it. So you can use it and you can query it in new and exciting ways that other products may not have thought about. And that's particularly interesting if you're trying to correlate different data sources because within that warehouse, you can then take things like your Facebook data and you can take your analytics data and you can write a query that's gonna cross both of those different data sources, then you can take that and you can push it out to Tableau or another source like Data Studio and create a report that you would never be able to get in any one of those tools. So I think it's a particularly interesting product and I think they have a very interesting philosophy. I encourage you to check it out. It's a little complex like to get into but if you can't wrap your head around it, there's a lot of power that you can have with it. Here again is the link to the dashboard if you want to download it and see we're at 12. So that comes kind of to the end-ish of my time here with you today on this side of the podium will be amongst you for the rest of the conference and excited to see what everyone else is gonna present on. We are hiring, looking for developers on the front and back end currently. If you are interested, come chat with me. You can check us out online beforehand. And here's my information if you'd like to connect with me personally at any point, feel free. Or I'm also here personally. Questions? Yes, sir. I feel like Google dashboard, is there any kind of API that they expose or are they can push data to so that they don't gather themselves? Any API to push data to the dashboards? Well, the way that the dashboards work, they're polling information and you can switch, you can set a different data source. So that data source can be a spreadsheet. It can be other sources that they don't control. Certainly, you know, I don't know if that's. Well, let me give you an example. We use a elastic search as a service. And they provide us with analytics. They provide us with time series analytics so we're able to catch a date for a particular data set. Let's say we've had seven days here at the top five servers. We'll be able to then push that data to the dashboards so that we can take the data and drag it around and make it all nice and pretty. What format do they deliver that information to you? CSB. Yeah, sure. You just drop that CSB and like, no problem. Yeah, so a CSB, if you put that into Google Drive, you know, you can, or you can use that import that into a sheet and then connect it and you're, you know, Bob's your uncle. Other questions? Don't be shy. Yes, sir. So sometimes Google's products are a challenge for accessibility with fancy work. I agree. Yeah. How about with the studio, what's the state of the... I haven't looked at it specifically, but I would guess not good. You know, there, it probably, you know, it looks good. You can tap through a lot of things, but just given the complexity of the interface for editing, I would guess, you know, really not that great, but analytics itself, I mean, that's a very challenging problem to present that information in a manner that is truly accessible. Any sort of mapping or graphing, I mean, that's a huge problem all over the internet for graphs and a lot of these types of products. Do you have some interface, do you think it's good or do you think it's good? I was interested if I'm providing it to a client right there. Yeah. It should work with voice over. Yeah. Because everything is interactive, so that's a huge problem. It's in the browser. But how meaningful that is, I'm not sure. You know, it'll tell you 36.2%, but does it give you the full context of where that number is coming from and does it relate to all of the rest of the context of your report? And if you move the things around, like does the voice respect the DOM, like what's the ordering of the information? Those are really good questions. Other, anyone wanna leave on a happy note? That was kind of sad. All right, well, thank you very much for your time. Hope you have fun with this report and feel free to reach out.