calpact new media webinar best practices: google analytics

Welcome to the Webinar!

New Media Best Practices: Google Analytics

We will begin shortly…

New Media Best Prac/ces: Google Analy/cs

Today you’ll be hearing from… Ma8 Schulte

Vice President of Digital Strategy Metropolitan Group

Lisa Peterson New Media Educa/on Specialist

CHL/CALPACT

Alex Bernardin Digital Content Manager

San Francisco AIDS Founda/on


Agenda •  Review of session objectives •  Housekeeping •  Matt Schulte ~ Metropolitan Group •  Alex Bernardin~ San Francisco AIDS Foundation •  Conclusion


Objectives •  Understand how to access your Google Analy/cs data and

generate reports •  Iden/fy /ps for understanding what the numbers mean for

your organiza/on


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Use #calpactNM14


Metropolitan Group

Ma8 Schulte Vice President of Digital Strategy

Metropolitan Group


What is (are?)‘Google Analytics’


●  Google Analytics captures your website’s activity, and measures your website’s performance.


SIMPLY PUT...


It’s a tool…not a strategy

• Capturing, measuring, analyzing and what-not


Seems like a lot of stuff...to know?

It doesn’t have to be overwhelming…

Even the basics can be enormously helpful for your organization.


WHAT KIND OF ACTIVITY?

For instance:

●  How many visitors has your site had in a specific date range?

●  How did they get there? (From search? From Facebook? Other websites?)

●  What pages get the most visitors?


HOW ABOUT WEBSITE PERFORMANCE?

For instance:

• What pages do visitors LEAVE your site from?

• Average visitor time on your website?

• What browsers are visitors using to access your site?


There IS a lot there!

But even those data points can give you a quick snapshot...and somewhere to start!


Let’s Go to Google Analytics and Explore: * Dates

* Intelligence events (snapshot)

* Real time

* Interests

* Technology

* Referrals

* Behavior


Google Webmaster Tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

An additional piece of code to add...



Submit your site to Google

Check for technical problems that may be stopping Google from indexing certain pages

Check on links pointing to your site

See popular keywords for your site

Check for malware or other intrusive technologies affecting your site

Data...without strategy or analysis won’t mean much...won’t help much.


STRATEGY!


Data / analytics will be most useful when your website has carefully defined goals/objectives.


What does your website do (or need to do) to advance your business or brand goals?

What do you want your site visitors to DO?

What ACTIONS do you want them to take?

...leading to what GOAL?


➔  Downloads?

➔  Sign-ups?

➔  Comments?

➔  Traffic?

➔  Social media campaign?



Objectives

Goals

KPI

Targets

Objective:

Attendance at health seminars

Goals:

Increase web sign-ups for health seminars

Key Performance Indicators:

# of Sign-ups

# of Individual Organization Memberships

Target:

Sign-ups: 200 per seminar

Memberships: 100 per month


* CONTENT Strategy *


CONTENT

●  Does your organization have an editorial calendar to organize/prioritize your content?


CONTENT


●  Are you using social media?


CONTENT


●  Are you using social media?

●  Does your content have ‘calls to action?’



CONTENT

Analytics can help you assess the success of your site’s content, as long as…


CONTENT

Analytics can help you assess the success of your site’s content, as long as…

...you’ve defined success.

Key Takeaways ★ Start with the basics, understanding your

dashboard ★ How you use Google Analytics will be (should be)

connected to a content strategy ★ Objectives - Goals - KPI - Targets ★ Webmaster tools


Q & A for Matt • Send a ques/on or comment using the chat box func/on

• Click “raise hand” bu8on to be taken off mute and ask a ques/on verbally

Ma8 Schulte Vice President of Digital Strategy

Metropolitan Group


San Francisco AIDS Foundation




Google Analytics Nitty Gritty Two Common Scenarios for GA Use, with real data: 1. Doing an Audit/Assessment

How to get a holistic sense of a website 2. Answering specific questions

a.  where does our traffic come from? b.  does our site work alright on mobile? c.  is our Facebook promotion helping?


Housekeeping Pro Tips: I’ll point out more advanced techniques, but you will probably need to do some more research on your own... Some additional resources will be available at:

http://alexjbconsulting.com (not my day job; I am not a full-time consultant)


Are we tracking? For the sake of time, I’m going to assume that someone has gone through and verified that your site tracking is well set up. This is often not the case. If you’d like to research it for yourself, there’s a list of common configuration pitfalls / things to think about here: http://alexjbconsulting.com/ga-pitfalls


Let’s Go to Google Analytics!

http://analytics.google.com


Step 2: Reporting The GA report grouping matches visitor flow:

A - Audience & Acquisition

B - Behavior

C - Conversions


Report: Audience -> Overview •  We have traffic (yay!) •  Adjust timeline to show more data •  Note obvious spikes/troughs DEEPER: •  Geo sub-report tells us where visitors live [PRO] Behavior->Engagement sub-reports


Report: Acquisition -> Overview Good snapshot report, but weird to read TAKEAWAYS: •  Where is your traffic coming from? And, possibly,

how do they behave when they’re there? •  You want diversity in your sources

[PRO] Channels sub-report for tabular view [PRO] connect AdWords and Webmaster accts


[PRO] Report: Acquisition -> All Referrals TAKEAWAYS: •  If your own site is in here, you’ve got tracking

issues and are losing data •  Strange-looking websites might be link-farms,

which can hurt your Search Engine ranking •  Good referral sources are opportunities for

reciprocal relationships •  Referrals often explain traffic spikes


Report: Behavior Overview Probably spend most of your time in the Behavior reports. Follow your nose… TO TRY: •  Play with the report timeframe •  Switch to week or month view to get quick

averages or to smooth out trendline •  Switch the main trendline metric to the ones

arrayed directly below it


Report: Behavior Overview KEY CONCEPTS: •  Pageviews vs Unique Pageviews •  Note spikes and troughs •  Consider annotations [PRO] Segments:add mobile & tablet [PRO] Experiment with other segments ○  Either vs comparable segs, or vs ‘all traffic’ ○  Don’t compare apples to staplers


Report: Behavior Overview TAKEAWAYS: •  Traffic patterns - by week? month? year? •  Overall trending up or down? •  Main metrics on this page are good candidates for

site-level KPIs •  Bounce Rate as an aggregate metric is not great,

and gets worse the more pages your site has, because it’s an average, but it’s very indicative at the individual page level


[PRO] Report: Behavior -> Site Search Does your site have search? Is it tracked? People use site search when they can’t find what they want through navigation, or if they feel lost. TAKEAWAYS: •  Huge potential insights for visitor intent •  From what page are people initiating?


[PRO] Report: Behavior -> Events Event tracking offers the ability to track visitor actions that are not a pageview.

CONSIDER: •  In-page interactive features, esp. Javascript-driven •  Mailto: links, PDF-downloads or offsite links •  Specific clicks that you might consier a ‘conversion’ •  From what page are people initiating?


Report: Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages This is where I’m likely to spend the most time, as it is the gateway to reports on individual pages. TRY: •  Expand list to more than 10 (try 100+) •  Focus on Unique Pviews, Entrances, Bounce Rate •  Click on icon next to URL to open the page •  Switch Primary Dimension to Page Title •  Skim for odd-looking URLs - really long, or hard to

read, or have ID numbers - consider Profile Filters


Report: Behavior -> Site Content ->All Pages TAKEAWAYS: •  What pages are in your top five? Any surprises? •  Narrow to a week or month with a traffic spike to

see which page shows as the top hit •  What’s the spread between the top pages and the

next-level? Any order-of-magnitude deltas? •  A high bounce rate for a page might mean “I

came, I puked, I left”


Report: Conversions •  Notice that there is no Conversions Overview report.

Conversions is the most subjective analytics reporting concept.

•  This section requires a variety of configurations in the Admin section - defining Goals and Funnels and/or turning on e-commerce tracking, all of which require more than a few minutes to walk through.

•  Goals are an excellent way to have GA reports reflect your org’s priorities (donations, sign ups, education).


Audit Wrap Up

A - Audience & Acquisition

B - Behavior

C - Conversions Going through the ABCs of Analytics will almost always result in lots of questions, but you’ll also have a broad sense of what’s going on with your site.


Answering Questions with Google Analytics Once you’re confident that the data in your GA is reliable and reasonably complete, you can start focusing your attention on specific metrics.


Google Analytics When would you do this process?

•  Answer specific questions

•  Monitor/check KPIs

•  Measure the effectiveness of a recent change


Questions for Google Analytics

Our site works fine for mobile users, right?



Our site works fine for mobile users, right? Audience->Mobile->Overview

Look at: % of uniques from desktop/mobile/tablet

Look at: bounce rate, pages/visit or time on site

OR:

Use Segmentation on any report to see mobile/tablet visitors

alongside All Traffic, such as home page, or other very

important page, or Goal Conversions

OR: [PRO]

Audience->Behavior -> Frequency/Recency (segmented)



How many pageviews did we get this month?



How many pageviews did we get this month?

STOP! This is a bad, bad, bad question.

REDIRECT: How many people visited our site?

Audience -> Overview



We should put this on the homepage so that

everyone coming to the site will see it.



We should put this on the homepage so that

everyone coming to the site will see it. Behavior->Site Content->All Pages

Look at: relative traffic to homepage vs other pages

OR:

Behavior->Site Content->Landing Pages

Specifically shows the top site entry points



Does posting to Facebook/Twitter/Google+ send

traffic to our site?



Does posting to Facebook/Twitter/Google+ send

traffic to our site? Acquisition->Social->Network Referrals

[PRO] set Secondary Dimension to Landing Page

OR:

Use Segmentation on any report to see All Referral traffic

OR:

Create Custom Segment for referral from specific site


Q & A for Alex • Send a ques/on or comment using the chat box func/on

• Click “raise hand” bu8on to be taken off mute and ask a ques/on verbally

Additional Resources/References: •  h8p://alexjbconsul/ng.com/google-‐analy/cs

•  h8p://analy/cs.blogspot.com/




Speaker Contact Information

Matt Schulte

[email protected]

Alex Bernardin [email protected]


What action step will you take after the webinar? •  What do you think you can do in the next month to

further your goals with Google Analytics? •  Let us know ~ we’d love to check back with you and hear how

it’s going! •  We appreciate your feedback!


Thank you! Have questions? Contact us at [email protected] To learn more about other trainings in this series visit:

http://chl.berkeley.edu/events/newmedia/2014-new-media-trainings/sessions.html


calpact new media webinar best practices: google analytics

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