Your website is the “front door” to your organization, and the centerpiece of a well-coordinated communications plan. Wouldn’t you want to know who’s crossing your threshold every day? Google Analytics is a great tool to help you do just that!
In this webinar, the third session in the latest 21st Century New Media Series from CALPACT and CHL at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, join Alex Bernardin from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Matt Schulte from Metropolitan Group as they share how they use Google Analytics to learn more about their website’s visitors – where they’re from, how they got there, what they’re looking for, what they like – all so they can hone their marketing activities for maximum impact.
Enjoy this resource from the training!
Listen to the webinar here:
http://cc.readytalk.com/play?id=69nto5
View the slides here:
http://www.slideshare.net/SPHCalpact/calpact-new-media-webinar-google-analytics
To learn more about this series, please visit: http://chl.berkeley.edu/events/newmedia/2014-new-media-trainings/sessions.html
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Website: www.calpact.org
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CALPACT New Media Webinar: Google Analytics Resources
1. Helpful Websites, Worksheets, Tutorials and Articles:
Google Analytics Audit Pre-Considerations. Alex Bernardin. April, 2014. alexjbconsulting.com
Worksheets from Previous Workshops: KPIs to Measure Engagement and Understanding KPIs
Occam’s Razor. Blog by Web Analytics Guru Avinash Kaushik.
Google Analytics: Training and Getting Started
How To: Get Started with Google Analytics. Meghan Peters. May 23, 2011. mashable.com.
A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Goals in Google Analytics. Glenn Gabe. April 13, 2012. SEJ Search Engine
Journal.
A High Bounce Rate Means… DiPietro Marketing Group LLC.
Google Webmaster Tools.
Question Answer
How do you actually link Google Analytics to your website? What
if you are not a webmaster and you do not submit your website
to Google. How do you look at this?
Look at the Analytics Help Center here. There are some tech-
nical hoops to jump through - you will probably need help from
the webmaster or someone with administrative access to the
site in order to set up tracking properly.
How do you track email newsletter response? Our provider
(MailChimp) generates code for each link, but not sure if we have
to do something with Google Analytics to track them?
Look in your Acquisition reports. Dig into the Campaigns report,
or start from the Overview and click on the Email channel. See if
you see codes that match what MailChimp is showing you. If
you do, great! If you don't then you need to look into coding the
URLs you put into MailChimp *before* you load them into the
MailChimp message. Luckily, there's a tool for that here .
Explore that area of the Google Support website, or search
elsewhere for guidance on ways to use that tool effectively - it
allows you to track things pretty much however you want.
Participant Q & A with Presenters
New Media Best Practices Webinar: Google Analytics
Resources
2. Question Answer
What is the average number of visitors for a non-profit site? Nonprofits come in all shapes and sizes (think your local animal
shelter vs. PETA), but you might look at some benchmark
reports published by M+R or by Blackbaud for an indication of
how organizations like yours are doing online.
There are websites like compare.com that can do some
external analysis of how your web traffic (or search engine
placement) does versus other sites that you see as competitors
(or comparitors). It’s recommended, though, to mainly use
Google Analytics to track your own improvement over time
rather than holding yourself to a benchmark standard.
How best to see the number of visits by the same IP address? I
would like to see if someone is doing something negative with
the site.
Probably not. Google Analytics is pretty strongly oriented to
avoid showing you what any one individual has done, and the
real-time reporting is also quite limited, making it a very poor
tool to watch for attacks or things like that. Additionally, Google
Analytics relies on javascript running in the page, which means
the page has to load in a browser that's running Javascript in
order to track the pageview. So network-type attacks would not
show up at all. It might be that I'm mis-interpreting the ques-
tion, but I'm not able to think of another way that someone
could be doing something with the site that would be negative
to the site that would be trackable through Google Analytics.
We have a survey housed in SurveyMonkey in our site. Does Ana-
lytics track how many users actually go to and respond to the
survey vs. those who decline the survey? Or would we need to
get that information from SurveyMonkey?
You could possibly use Event tracking on the link to the survey
to see who clicked over to it, but once they're in the survey,
they're off your website, so your Google Analytics is not
tracking them anymore. Another answer to this, from one of
the gurus of Web Analytics (Avinash Kaushik) is here .
So, we need tech support to get started with set-up? This depends on where you're hosting your website. If you're
on WordPress, you should search for the Yoast Google Analytics
plug-in . It's the best solution out there for WordPress. It's well-
documented and makes setup as straightforward as possible.
This does not absolve you from having someone do a 'checkup'
to make sure that things are being tracked properly across the
board, but it might possibly be good enough to get you going.
If you're on another platform, the mechanics of getting setup
are different. There's javascript code that needs to be placed so
that it's included on every single page of your site. Different
CMS systems offer different solutions for this (such as Black-
baud), and some are great while some fall short (like Black-
baud). This probably sounds like a scare tactic, but to me, bad
data is worse than no data.
3. Question Answer
Our site allows users to access data on various population health
indicators. Can Analytics tell us how many users create reports,
and how many print these reports that were created by the user?
Broadly, yes. If it happens on your website, Google Analytics
can track it.
More specifically, it depends a great deal on the tools that are
in use. If creating reports means navigating through webpages
with URLs, then those pageviews will show in the Behavior sec-
tion, and you can construct Goals and Goal Funnels to see how
often people complete the process. If the action all happens via
javascript, then you might need to implement Event Tracking in
Javascript to get the interactions tracked in a meaningful way.
If the report creation happens in an iframe, using a closed sys-
tem to which you don't have customization access, then you're
mostly out of luck.
How is the bounce rate defined and what are some strategies to
reduce a bounce rate?
One resource is here.
If you go to the Behavior->Overview report and hover over the
term 'bounce rate', Google Analytics will give you a brief expla-
nation. In a nutshell, Bounce Rate means a visitor only viewed a
single page on your site during a session (a session ends by de-
fault after something like 30 minutes of inactivity).
To decrease bounce rate means to entice people to click else-
where on your site. The URL above has some good tips, most of
which I agree with when thinking about a blog site. If your site
is not a blog, then I would tackle the problem page-by-page
starting with the highest traffic pages. Find ways to incorporate
more links within the content of the page. Consider breaking
the page up into smaller pieces so that they're more easily di-
gested. You might need to consider a site redesign because
your site might just be really hard to interact with or navigate.
These days I would also look at bounce rate for mobile/tablet
users separately from desktop, because that will give you a clue
as to whether you have a usability problem with small-screen
users.
Can google analytics send weekly reports? A good resource is here at the Google Analytics support site.