Hidden Secrets of Google Analytics - Do Good Data 2015

google
analytics
@devonvsmith
I’m Devon Smith

Founded the analytics practice at Threespot

Digital agency in DC, exclusively serving nonproﬁts, foundations, & government agencies

I’m using their data, but hopefully anonymized

Focus on *communications* data in large part

slideshare.net/devonvsmith
05: secrets
40: Reports
20: data
20: process
05: beyond GA
@devonvsmith
90 minutes together to look at:

5 secrets, 7 reports, 5 front-end code implementations, 6 admin customization, and 1 script

Assume you have some knowledge about GA

Happy to stay after to discuss Q&A, or reach out to me on Twitter, also posted on Slideshare

step 1
ask questions &
test hypotheses
Don’t just open GA and click around to see what you can ﬁnd

Develop a list of questions you want to get answered,

or a list of hypotheses you want to prove/disprove

Look for the data to support those, and lead to new questions

step 2
Use less data
Sounds counter-intuitive, but look at the leaf, not the forest

Ignore everything about your site except for one data point

Advanced segments, advanced searches, secondary dimensions

step 3
add better data
Don’t rely only on the data that GA gives you by default

Front-end code for event tracking, social actions, linking accounts, customize admin section

step 4
extract data
Process: use the tools built into GA to export data in various forms,

so that you can manipulate it in excel/google spreadsheets

step 5
add insights
Google Analytics only tells you what is happening,

not why, or how you should change your approach.

Every report you deliver to stakeholders using GA data should include a

“Here’s what we’re going to do diﬀerently next time around” section.

Better
Reports
@devonvsmith
GA’s key reports are: Who —> Audience; How —> Acquisition; What —> Behavior

Assumes no code knowledge, just manipulating reports

7 reports I use most often

@devonvsmith
who (actually)
visits our site?
The very ﬁrst thing I look at for any new project

Often when I ask, who does visit, or who do you want to visit, orgs have fairly generic answers:

Funders, Government, Media, Peers

But there are huge variabilities within any of those segments

So let’s dive deeper…within the Government, do you care about local, state, federal? In certain areas? Agencies?

Looking at what type of content on your site? Are they ﬁnding it?

Network report answers these questions

And is probably most under-used report in GA

List of service providers - the name of the internet service provider of the person browsing your site

Top of the list will always be mobile phone carriers, generic home internet providers

But you’re looking for the visitors browsing at work
Use an advanced segment to narrow down this list

I’ll show you how to create a segment later in the workshop,

for now, these are segments I’ve created based on some current clients

Choose: Federal Government

[share link to segment]
Hovering over a segment shows you who’s in it

I’m looking for those providers whose names include any of these; exclude those

now we see a list of organizations we actually care about

This is a list stakeholders actually care about

You can track the growth of this audience segment over time

Think about applying this segment to your campaign tracking as well

Now let’s see what content they were looking at

Choose a secondary dimension.

In this case, if advanced segment is the WHO, dimension is the WHAT

Now we have the list of content this group of users was looking at over a period of time

Let’s scroll up the page

One of our stakeholders really cares about this data

Let’s automatically email them ONLY the data they care about

Every Monday, they see the report about which pieces of content some from HoR looked at in the past week

If you have trouble with content creators committing to producing new content, this helps

@devonvsmith
who sent them
to us?
Some visitors are self motivated - they had a speciﬁc topic or question they decided to search for

We’ll talk in a moment about how to increase your exposure to them

But other visitors are referred to you by some other organization, via a link

Part of your communications strategy should be how to inﬂuence those organizations, often by providing content to them

Let’s look at Referral Sources

Sometimes we see a big spike in traffic and it’s great!

Other times, it’s a spam attack

but in either case, this aggregate view of all traffic is like looking at an average - it buries the variation/outliers

Let’s add a few advanced segments to screen out some of that traffic

So I can pay attention to the links that actually matter

Let’s look at 3 diﬀerent segments

I’ve pre-identiﬁed referral links from websites that are focused on job seekers, the media, or org partners

Now we can see the trends we care about

Easier to see unique trends for each of these groups

But the bottom section is still too messy for me, and includes a bunch of data I don’t care about

That’s better. I can see who the organizations are quickly.

For job seekers, I can start working with HR to focus on who’s sending most eﬀective candidates

Start working with the PR department to ID which media sources we should be pitching stories to

Work with our programmatic team to know which of our partners share our audience & think content partnerships

@devonvsmith
What are they
looking for?
Let’s go back to that other half of visitors who are self-motivated to ﬁnd a piece of information

If we can identify what they’re looking for, and provide it to them better, or increase our exposure to them

Organic Search Keywords

For many content-heavy nonproﬁt sites, organic search makes up around 50% of traﬃc

f
two problems: 80-95% (not provided) - which we’ll solve in a moment

& a long list of branded search terms

so let’s ﬁnd a more interesting set of keyword queries your site visitors used

exclude branded terms

include “how” statements

just one example of many

Now I have a list of questions users had when they arrived on site

Use this to adapt your content strategy

Write blog posts, create resources

@devonvsmith
What (else) are
they looking for?
But remember those (not provided) terms?

Google masks all organic keyword queries from users who are logged in to google products

You can see more of those terms if you’re an AdWords buyer

But this report will also show you

If you click this item and see this page, you need to take an extra step

Go to: google.com/webmasters

Link to your Google Analytics Property

Verify that your two accounts belong to the same organization

Now you see a report that shows:

Impressions - how many times your site appeared for a user who had this query

Clicks - how many times they actually clicked on your site

Position - what position your site was in (Google is 10 sites/page)

Use this in an SEO strategy. High value keywords where your position or CTR is low

@devonvsmith
What are they
looking for
right [here]?
That was all about keyword queries visitors use in an external search engine to FIND your site

But once they get to your site, they often still can’t ﬁnd what they’re looking for

Again, let’s focus on a single page

Typical to see 1-2% of visitors using internal site search

Let’s see what they’re searching for

Long list

Often, top of list is a [null] result because your search ﬁeld is confusing

And jobs-related

For foundations, “logo” is common bc your grantees are looking for it

Let’s screen out those words we don’t need, so we can focus on what is important/diﬀerent each month

New advanced segment to exclude those terms i don’t care about

now i can start to identify trends —> better promote content? new organization of content? new content?

content types (podcast, archive, data, documentary)

topics (arts, community engagement, voting)

people (fernando, alberto)

geographies (detroit)

Let’s hop back out to another report

Which pages are visitors on, when they’re searching for a particular term?

In this case, people aren’t ﬁnding what they need from “About”

Jobs are promoted elsewhere on the site

But these visitors are looking for jobs on the About page

Now we have a better understanding how to adapt the content strategy of that given page

For some of you, clicking on any report in this section looks like this - no data

Let’s ﬁx this by going up to Admin

And turn site search tracking on

And now I need to ﬁnd the parameter my internal site search is using to identify keywords

in most case, this will be q or s.

@devonvsmith
what do users need
from [this] page?
Secret: Most orgs, the majority of your users will not see your homepage during their visit

(BTW: use an advanced segment to prove that)

But your homepage is typically your most viewed page overall

So stakeholders care a lot about their place on the homepage

but what do your users actually need?

Let’s look at a Navigation Path

Google Analytics has an endless array of tabs that are hiding data from you

Navigation Summary shows you where users were, and where they went afterward

Let’s look at the top left corner -

when you can, turn percentages into people

3 in 4 people who see the homepage, are landing there as their ﬁrst experience of the site

1 in 4 come from somewhere else in the site

For those, most come from about

But for now, I’m more interested in where they go TO next

1 in 2 leave the site entirely

For the others, mostly they go to see more About the organization

So how do we take a homepage like this, with dozens of links,

and simplify based on what users actually need

@devonvsmith
how much is
[that] action worth?
Goals - high hopes, low follow through

For the nonproﬁts, foundations, & gov I work with, a lack of goals implemented in GA is not your problem

A lack of clear goals in general might be

When you’re not an e-commerce, it’s harder to put a value on a goal

How much it’s worth to download a PDF depends on who is downloading

Even most of the largest orgs we’re working with don’t use goals, so you’re not alone

Start setting up a new goal (20 max)

4 types -

destination page (good for subscribing, donating, buying; or the last step in any multi-page process)

duration - how long someone spends on the site (good for orgs w/ ads; engagement models where you know the time it takes to
complete an action/lesson)

pages/session - just what it sounds like (good for apps, much harder for sites; not all pages are equal)

events - any action on the site that doesn’t generate a new URL (mostly use this one)

Destination page - end of an application process

Deﬁne a:

page,

monetary value (which you can make up, based on COMM budget),

multi-step process (to see where in the funnel users are dropping oﬀ)

Duration

deﬁne the time and value

Pages/Session

deﬁne pages & value

Event

Deﬁne the event & its value

we’ll look at creating events in a few minutes, but these are 4 parameters applied to any given event

Goals Overview page, let’s look at the 4 goals this organization has implemented

Pretty typical list of high value engagement events for a think tank that cares about content

Once we’ve clicked on a single goal, we can follow it through any other report

In this case, I’m looking at social media sharing by device

Not surprising the conversion is much lower for mobile

But that has to do with the ease of sharing from a mobile device

@devonvsmith
Look at another type of goal conversion

For a mobile web app that had multiple steps a user progressed through

We identiﬁed a few places in the funnel where users were dropping out

Focused on A/B testing those pages

Better
data
@devonvsmith
5 pieces of data you can add to your Google Analytics implementation

I’ve included front end code in the ﬁrst few to show as example

but it’s just a piece of the overall implementation (dependencies)

@devonvsmith
custom dimensions
In the past, we saw primary dimensions and secondary dimensions applied to our data

Custom Dimensions are new data points that you’re adding to Google Analytics

based on parameters that are deﬁned in your CMS

Blog posts are a good example

Content drilldown organizes your site based on URL structure (slashes)

Click on blog to see all blog posts

now we have a list of blog posts

But unless you have an editor for your blog, there’s probably no one in the organization that cares about every blog post.

in most cases, authors care about their own posts, or a program area cares about their posts

so let’s add “author” to this data (which is captured in the blog post, but not by default in GA)

now I see who some of my top authors are

and could send a report to them of only their blog posts

same idea, but now we’re looking at program areas (here called Category)

Now sorted by program area, I can easily export this data & build more relevant graphs

Custom Dimensions require FE code knowledge

In admin, you deﬁne ID numbers for your new data points

Here are the two dimensions we’ve deﬁned

Deﬁning is a simple decision about how frequently you want this data point

Every time it happens? only once per session? once per use? once per product?

// Projects
var project = metaTag('project') || '(not set)';
return {
'hitType': 'pageview',
'page': customURL,
'dimension1': legacyID,
'dimension2': pageDate,
'dimension3': project,
'dimension4': engagementOptions,
'dimension5': wordCount,
'dimension6': imgCount,
'dimension7': mediaContact,
'dimension8': relatedTags
};
one example of capturing dimensions based on what ‘project’ it belongs to

what else you might think about capturing

@devonvsmith
event: Scroll depth
Webpages are much longer now

Concern about whether users are consuming the entire piece of content

Implement an event tracker that captures how far down the page a user scrolls

Again, event = no change in URL, so in this case, scrolling

for this org, we have 30 or so diﬀerent events implemented across a dozen categories

Scroll depth is tracked for every page on the site

So how many people get from here

Now I see the pages that are viewed most often, click on a single page

Now I know what percent of users get what percent way down the page

Baseline - 40% don’t scroll at all (they never leave the baseline)

25% - 25% get a quarter down the page

100% - 5% make it all the way down to the last pixel of the footer

Let’s start setting thresholds for what “good” means (25% make it 75%, etc)

http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/
Open source plugin for GA for Wordpress

We took this code and adapted for ruby on rails

In this case, the quartile measurement isn’t ﬁne grain enough

we care about anchor links to understand what visitors need from this page

@devonvsmith
event: anchor link
Anchor Links - Barr

Let’s go back to the About page

And look at anchor links, instead of at scroll depth

Now we can see how frequently users are clicking on those anchor links

Visitors care a lot about the people of this organization

data-track=“{
"type" : "event”,
"category" : "Component Interaction”,
"action" : "Anchor Link”,
"label" : "Staff”
}"
FE code implementation, once these are all deﬁned

So let’s think about bumping that piece of content to the top of the page

Explains why so few people are scrolling to the footer - they don’t care (as much) about content at the bottom of the page

But let’s look at the very bottom of the page

There’s a few key actions here that we care about

Social following + helping users navigate the site + newsletter subscription

@devonvsmith
event: relative CTA
When you have multiple Calls to Action on a single page, or component,

need to compare them

Labels in this case are deﬁned by *where* the action takes place

So looking at the footer in particular

Here are our three diﬀerent calls to action

Social is surprisingly low

But when we look back, social takes up far less real estate

If that’s a key metric, how do we make that action more prominent?

@devonvsmith
event: multimedia
one challenge for any analyst is pulling together data from multiple sources

for video embedded on your website, YouTube is always going to have the most comprehensive data, so it’s typically worth it to
log into their platform to pull data

But it won’t give you correlation about what else video watchers do on your site

Let’s go back to a list of events

now we see a list of videos that got any plays on the site

we’ve appended the video title and length of video to the event label for easy reference

using google tag manager

click on a particular video

Now we know roughly how far into the video they made it.

And start thinking about where the video sits in the page

The quality and length of the ideal videos on the site

Better
Process
@devonvsmith
six diﬀerent ways to be more eﬃcient with your data process in GA

advanced segments
Advanced Segments - we’ve seen lots of them applied, now let’s build one

Options for any data point in Google Analytics

But I typically skip straight to conditions

Deﬁne any single or set of conditions

So this segment would be only those sessions that included a PDF download

Can also set up ordered sequences: you came from social media, and then you shared a blog post

Pop back out to creating a segment

You can share this segment with anyone (we do for clients)

Or import from the gallery

but to be honest, i haven’t found very useful

filters
Filters screen data out permanently from a given GA view

It’s like a permanent advanced segment

Create a new filter to:

exclude your own internal traffic, vendor traffic

include only certain subdomains in certain views (segregate out a jobs subdomain)

Four types of ﬁlters

Also helps with cross domain tracking

Annotations
Annotations - leave breadcrumbs to yourself or other staﬀ about what happened when

Let’s explain what happened on these two days since it so dramatically changed our traﬃc

No one has time to log into GA every day to see what’s going on

So give GA prompts to email or text you if something crazy like this happens

Go up to admin

custom alerts (aka intelligence events)
And set up a custom alert (GA also calls these intelligence events)

For Reddit Spike

Choose over what *time* period *something* hits some *threshold*

And this is the email I get now

Only bummer: next day (not real time)

shortcuts
We’ve adapted lots of reports this afternoon

But sometimes it’s a little cumbersome

Create shortcuts to reports that you ﬁnd yourself building frequently

@devonvsmith
Now it’s a single click away

custom reports
Sometimes you can’t get a report to look exactly like what you want

Create a custom report that shows you only the data & graphs you care about

And add any number of dimensions you like

Where before we could only see blog category or author

Let’s set up a report to see both

I need to choose the metric group (essentially what you’re used to seeing on the right side of GA)

and a set of dimensions (what you see on the left side, and what happens when you click on a given one)

Now these are the only 3 pieces of data we’re looking at

Just blog posts, just page views,

beyond
google
Analytics
@devonvsmith

Thanks!
@devonvsmith
slideshare.net/devonvsmith
Foundations: Irvine, Barr, Knight, Pew Trusts, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

Nonproﬁts: Planned Parenthood, Business for Social Responsibility, Ford’s Theatre, Smithsonian, UNICEF

what else can you do?
Content Groups - group related pages together
Cost Data Import - add marketing costs to calculate ROI
Experiments - A/B testing
In-Page Analytics - hotspots on the page
E-Commerce Tracking - product purchases
User IDs - track logged in users
Industry Benchmarking - see anonymized peer data
Session Timeouts - decide how long before a “log out”
Search Term Exclusions - permanently ignore branded
Channel Groupings - group related referrals together
Attribution Models - give values to your channels
Google Tag Manager - more FE code, easier deployment
Real Time - monitor events
language - group “en” together; c = bots

Seconds <10

@devonvsmith
who visits our site?
(part 2)
Demographics & Interests

Demographics and Interests data comes from the third-party DoubleClick cookie (for web traﬃc) and from anonymous identiﬁers
for mobile apps (i.e., Advertising ID for Android and IDFA for iOS).

Enable:

Enable Advertising Features for your property, and

Enable the Demographics and Interests reports for the view.

Analytics uses the same age, gender, and interests categories that you use in AdWords to target ads on the Google Display
Network.

Notice the % of total sessions in upper right

Don’t put an emphasis on these numbers yet

Key Metrics don’t oﬀer “users”

Aﬃnity = lifestyle

In-Market = product purchase habits

Other = more detailed view (sub categories)

Any deﬁnition of an audience that you uncover in your Analytics reports can be turned into a Remarketing Audience that you can
use in AdWords.

@devonvsmith
how did they
get here?
(part 2)
Referral Sources

@devonvsmith
What’s the ROI
of our adwords?
AdWords Campaigns

If you haven’t yet linked your account…

Show multiple accounts - your grants & your paid

@devonvsmith
event: social share
Social Plugins

Social sharing is another key action on the site

For this organization, particularly on the blog

But there were questions about where this social sharing functionality should be

So we set up a quick and dirty a/b test

Hidden Secrets of Google Analytics - Do Good Data 2015

Hidden Secrets of Google Analytics - Do Good Data 2015

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Hidden Secrets of Google Analytics - Do Good Data 2015