DMAW Digital Day 2015 small group discussion slides for non-profit marketers to learn more about important ways to use Google Analytics
Full agenda: http://www.dmaw.org/2015-digital-day-forum/
3. Campaign Tracking
What does it do?
Attributes website traffic to your marketing efforts
Campaign is a buzz or trigger word at most orgs.
Redefine it for yourself.
Getting Started:
• URL builder - http://lunametrics.co/campaign-tagging
• Tracking Document – http://bit.ly/S4Sutm
8. Event Tracking Framework
Category Action Label
Homepage Upper Nav Click About Us
Action Alert Take Action Id: 1234
Donation Form Email Subscribe Opt-Out
Blog Post Category Click Climate Change
10. Tag Management
• Use it to migrate to Universal Analytics
• Cross-domain ease
• yoursite.com + secure2.convio.net = samesies
• Naming conventions are important for organizing your
• GA-Pageview-yoursite.com
• GA-Pageview-subdomain.yoursite.com
11. Implementing Tag Management
• There are vendors who can help implement
• Have business process documentation
• All your URLs/Sites
• Ad tracking code/pixels
• Conversion (likely goals in Google Analytics)
• Prioritize your business processes
• Evaluate risks involved in making changes
Campaign Tracking!
These are little bits of information that you add to URLs that will attribute traffic to your marketing efforts.
How to?
- Test it out using the URL builder
- Figure out the primary channels and ways that you communicate that bring traffic to your website
- Document those communication paths using the hierarchy of Campaign, Medium and Source.
- Integrate these into links to your site in your email stationary, autoresponders, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram profile links, print URLs, etc.
- Find Zen in typos and other people’s campaign tracking in your data.
Examples:
301 redirects: worldwildlife.org/discover
Vanity URLs: wwfcatalog.org
If I were marketing Digital Day, here are some examples of how I would set up tracking.
Multi-Channel Funnel Reports
Now that you’ve defined ways that traffic gets to your site, you can start to see how different traffic sources are used together to bring your organization money $$
Learn More: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1250116?hl=en&ref_topic=1191164
Event Tracking!
This is something you need to ask your web production or development person/team to install on your website(s).
How to?
- Define what types of interactions you’d like to track: clicks, scrolling, form fields
- Document those interactions by types of pages
- You’ve created your event tracking framework
- To install, have your webdev look at the documentation. Tracking can be installed through global javascript functions/file, through link onclick events or through Tag Manager.
Here are some examples of how events might be categorized
Google Tag Manager
For many organizations Tag Management can seem like a pipedream.
Many articles online will state that installing GTM will mean “never talking to a developer again”
This isn’t quite true. It really just changes your QA processes and how things go-live.
GTM can fire your Google Analytics, Adwords, Bing, or Facebook code snippets, or tags.
Your developer would remove the Google Analytics code snippet from your site and place a single GTM container code snippet.
GTM allows you to more easily migrate to Universal Analytics
- Google will force you eventually to move from classic
- UA will make it easier to make your different sites look like one site: Cross Domain
Cross-domain
- It’s the technique of making many websites report into GA “as one”
- EX: worldwildlife.org + gifts.worldwildlife.org + support.worldwildlife.org = *.worldwildlife.org
- EX: Your Content Management System, Your Donation Platform, Your Blog = yoursite.org
- This ensures that when traffic comes to one of your sites, that a session won’t restart when they hit a different part of your website that is on a third-party
Naming Conventions
- If you haven’t already figured out from the frameworks of Campaign and Event Tracking, I like naming conventions.
- WWF’s current GTM Container publishes 66 different tags – consistent names help bring order to chaos.
- Identify the publisher of the tag: Google Analytics, Adwords, MyPoints, Bing, etc.
- Identify the type of tag: pageview, event, donation conversion vs email conversion, etc.
- For triggers, I recommend noting whether something is “fire” trigger vs a “block trigger” or whether a trigger is supposed to evaluate something - “has”
Implementing
If you’re going to peruse Google Tag Manager and you don’t have resources in house, there are vendors out there that can assist you – Lunametrics and Cardinal Path are good vendors to start with.
Have some business process documentation ready – like what your conversions are (likely Goals in Google Analytics), what are all your URLs, and any ad tracking code/pixels that you use.
Prioritize your URLs/sites and evaluate risks involved in making changes.
Implementation
Unless you have the technical capacity and in-house knowledge, consider talking to a vendor.
WWF used a Request for Information process rather than an RFP process to find a vendor that fit our needs.