I have been knee deep researching and thinking about Web Analytics in general and Google Analytics in particular for a third screencast in a series I'm doing for NTEN. (The other two included my tagging and widgets screencasts). The research has been going slowly -- partly because web analytics is a very complex and geeky topic. I'm phobic of anything that might remotely appear to involve math or that makes me feel stupid.
Here's my first draft or what might be called a "treatment." I would appreciate any suggestions, improvements, pointers to other resources or if your organization has a story to tell about web analytics.
Possible Working Titles:
1. Analytics This!
2. Web Analytics As Simple Gifts To Measure Mission
3. Zen and the Art of Web Analytics
Scope:
This screencast will demystify web analytics and use Author and Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik's mantra of simplicity to illustrate some of the useful features and reports in Google Analytics, a free but powerful web analytics software tool. Kaushik's thinking is based on "Occam's Razor Principle" (which boils down to a poetic way of saying "KISS") The screencast will show some practical examples of how at least one nonprofit organization's web site, the Idealist, is using the software in practice. The screencast will include a companion wiki with resources to aid further explanation.
If you're curious about Occam's Razor, here's a more detailed description or see the simplicity page in wikipedia.
I was happy to discover Laura Quinn's recently published and very good article on TechSoup, "A Few Web Analytics Tools." She not only gives an overview of the different choices of analytics software tools available, but also provides basic definitions for the data one might collect. Since this screencast will only show how one tools works, Google Analytics, her article provides the larger context and summarizes the pros/cons of the complete range of tools.
Screencast Audience and Learning Objectives
The audience for this screencast is nonprofits that know they need to analyze the success of their Web sites, but aren't sure where to begin. Or they might have some understanding of metrics and have gone as far as setting up a free google analytics account, but are not sure what to do next. The nonprofit's web site isn't overly complex and has a clear marketing strategy in place. The nonprofit will most likely not have a full-time IT or web manager staff person. Or, if they do, the nonprofit will not have a full-time Web Analyst, although might work with a web analyst on a consulting basis.
Learning Goals
- To understand the definition web analytics
- To understand how to identify actionable reports from the complex sea of information collected in an analytics tool
- To demonstrate how to get started using Google Analytics, navigate filters, and use goal-setting features.
- How can Google Analytics reports data help improve your Web site's performance
- To show a practical example of how Google Analytics is used by a nonprofit organization
What follows is a very rough draft for a script.
Act 1: Analytics This!
A: Definition
It was not too long ago that no one understood what that term meant. Let's take a look at the "Official Definition" from the Web Analytics Association, an association of web analytic professionals. (They host Web Analytics Wednesdays around the world and you can hear the definition described by their chapter in Brussels)
Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.
What is the visual metaphor? Pilot's dashboard?
It's a process as Bruce Clay outlines here and I have simplified here:
GRAPA
-Step 1: Goals for the web site as guides to the data collection
-Step 2: Research questions to frame your data collection (why/what around your outcomes)
-Step 3: Analytics software tool to collect data
-Step 4: Pick reports to answer your research questions
-Step 5: Action that improve your web site performance or marketing campaign effectiveness.
Hmm .. I think of Grappa, a fragrant grape-based pomace brandy of between 40% and 60% alcohol by volume (80 to 120 proof), of Italian origin. In Italy, grappa is primarily served as a "digestivo" or after dinner drink. Its main purpose was to aid in the digestion of the heavy meals. Grappa may also be added to espresso coffee to create a "coffee-killer" The espresso is drunk first, followed by a few ounces of grappa served in its own glass.
Resources
Defining Web Analytics by Neil Mason
How To Use Web Analytics, Part 1 by James Maguire
Top-Ten Web analytics blogs from Avinash Kaushik
B: Coffee Machine or Plantation? Why Simplicity Matters
"Web Analytics packages are sold as if it's an automatic coffee maker. In fact, it is more like buying a coffee plantation. You can still get your cup of coffee (eventually), but your going to have to stick your hands in a lot more manure than you ever knew."
Tom Cunniff - Yahoo Web Analytics Forum
C: What happens when you look at the software as the end, not the beginning?
If you jump into using any web analytics tool without the above 5-point process, you are likely to get overwhelmed with data. You won't be able to think. You can't make meaning. You can't find the forest through the trees. There are no insights. (Needs photo of someone holding their head or screaming)
So, how to deal with the complexity? Well, get to that in a minute. You'll face that problem with any tool you ultimatley use. So, let's select a tool first.
Act 2: Selecting An Analytics Tool
There are a number
of web analytics software tools available ranging from simple web
counters, web hosting stat tools and more powerful (and expensive)
software packages. Google Analytics offers more functionality than
your typical web site counter and even better yet it's free.
Laura Quinn, in her recent article on TechSoup, notes:
Because the Google Analytics package is in an indefinite beta stage, some of the experts we consulted with cited occasional problems. Several reported difficulty in getting Google to show up-to-date stats, while others noted a very occasional loss in historic stats for an entire site. Google's customer service supports this product primarily through automated emails, so you may have little recourse if you encounter problems. The method by which this tool monitors traffic results in lower numbers (such as fewer visitors, and fewer page views) than some other methods. Also, keep in mind that Google offers its product for free because it makes money by watching you; by using Analytics, you're agreeing to let Google store your information and use it for aggregate reports.
Nevertheless, Google Analytics is widely used and widely liked. If you're building a new Web site, or have a bit of HTML knowledge, Google is a great free option for surprisingly robust analytics.
(Would be great to get a over in Laura's )
The Official FAQ: How Does Google Analytics Help Me?
While setting up Google Analytics account is quick and painless, using some of advanced features isn't all that simple or easy to do if you're not a certified Google Analytics partner, one of the outside consulting companies that provide tailored professional services for using the product.
So, if your nonprofit web site has complex tracking and analysis needs, you may need to work with a specialist consultant to set up your account and train staff to use it. Several of the larger nonprofit organizations we interviewed for this screencast have gone that route.
Act 3: Google Analytics That! An Introduction
You can start exploring google analytics to see if it is right for you and we're going to use to demonstrate some of the simplicity concepts offered by Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. Note that the proceeds from his book will benefit the Smile Train and Doctors Without Borders to assist in their efforts to make our world a better place.
Show the sign up procedure and how easy it is insert the secret code to get started tracking your Web site's statistics.
It's deceptively easy though and it is important to get your program set up correctly the first time. Google Analytics: Get it Right the First Time by Michael Harrison
This YouTube video shows how to exclude your internal traffic (min 2:13) by using a filter.
The 3 Most Frequently Asked Google Analytics Questions
Act 4: A Quaker's Approach To Using Google Analytics
(Production Note: I wonder if "Simple Gifts" is in the public domain?)
Avinash Kaushik says that some reports are more important than others and it comes down to a few essential questions. All the metrics you collect, ask the So What? Test three times and if doesn't lead to action, you are wasting your time! (Recycle my slide from my training webinar to create an example - get an absurd example meaningless data from google analytics)
(See Six Key Reports in this interview as possible alternative framework with integration of metric definitions and identify pages in book where the how-to is.)
1: How many visitors/visits/unique visitors during a given period time?
These metrics are important because every other metric you need will be based on one of these.
Let's define these:
Visits. This metic shows the number of visitors to a particular site or page. This is a one time or one-session browsing a web site. It doesn't mean you're unique, it doesn't mean that you haven't been to this web site before - maybe in the same day! Closing your browser or leaving the site ends the visit. It's arbitary how much time has to pass before it is considered a new visit, half an hour is often used. (Show the browser view of what one visit to a web site looks like; show what two visits look like and show what three visits looks like.)
Unique Visitors. This is the number of site visits by different users. It is typically determined by a cookie or your IP address or a combination. It isn't a perfect science, it is an estimate. It is really important to understand how your software tracks unique visitors.
Let's say I visited the NTEN web site 4 times, Alan Benamer visited 3 times, and Laura Quinn visited 5 times. We'd have three unique visitors and 12 visits.
These statistics let you answer some basic questions:
- How many visitors are visiting our web site?
- What is the overall trend in the number of visits for each page of our site?
- What is the overall trend of overall visits to our site over time? (Week, Month)
The trend in the overall number of visits to your site over time can give you insight into your site's popularity. Comparing the number of visits to each page is also a good way to identify which parts of your site are most useful to your visitors.
2: From where are your web site visitors coming from?
Understand effectiveness of your acquisition strategy.
The more you know about your web visitors intent the better. For example, you can check the referring url and look at the messaging there. Understand what lead the visitor to your site.
Look for surprises in the referring report.
- Do the expected sites show up?
- Who are the uknown friends?
For approximately 60%, you should see a specific url. The other 40% may be coming from email or direct. It's a great visiting card that someone is bringing to your site. Also look at your unknown friends. Are there links from blogs? Are there sites creating links from the goodness of their hearts? Follow those links and find out who they are. Why are they sending you traffic? What is the call to action? If it someone you don't have a relationship with, maybe this is a good time to do that.
What we are seeing here is a shallow dive. The next step is to do a deep dive where you can go into each web site that is referring traffic and see what the quality is. How long are they staying on your site?
- Inferring intent from search keywords
What percent of my traffic is from search engines? And, is it enough? According to research, approximately 80% of web users use search engines to find sites. What is your benchmark? So, how does your compare?
Are the expected search engines showing up? Are we overleveraged on one search engine? If so, take the proper strategy to make sure you're showing up on the search engines.
Take a look at the keywords. What are the quality keywords that are bringing traffic to my web site? (long visits)
3: Focus on what your nonprofit wants your web site visitor's to do:
- Why does your site exist? Helps you focus on the data you need to answer that question only.
- What are your top three strategies?
- What should be happening on your web site?
- How are you acquiring traffic?
- What are the customer problems you are trying to solve?
From these questions, you need to pick the three most critical metrics to measure success goals. The goals provide the critical context to understand the performance of your web site.
Show example of Idealist tracking the different language versions and geographic distribution
4: Understanding web site visitor behavior
How do they get in?
You will be using a "top entry page" report. The analysis questions are "What's the real value of the home page?" What percentage are actually entering from the top? What page is creating the first impression of the site What are myvisitors looking for? It is also important to understand where people are entering from search engines.
What content do they consume?
This is the "top viewed" pages on the web site. You look at the 10-20 pages. You will be shocked at what you find here. You want to know what content your visitors are consuming and is this the content you want them to consume? The site overlay report can help you learn what people are interested in.
Page Views. The number of times any page was viewed regardless of who viewed. (Show a date range and indicate that all those views could, in theory, come from the same person clicking over and over again.) This is an important metric if, for example, you're using GoogleAdsWords, which pays based on a percentage of page views which result in a click through for an ad is what pays.
How do they navigate? What's catching their fancy?
Show the funnel report from idealist.
More detail
ClickTracks Web Analytics Education Series, Virtual World: Feb 26 & 27, 2007
“Unleash the Power of Web Analytics.”
While written from a business or commercial perspective, Eric Enge has an article called "9 Ways to Make Money on Analytics" which includes tips and suggestions for thinking about how the data can help you think through improvements that may lead to more donations or revenue.
Web Analytics Course from Site Logic
Interview with Dave Amos, Idealist
How does the information from Google Analtyics inform your decision-making re: web site campaign?
We've been using Google Analytics since November 2006, so I would still call us new to the software. Because we're still new, I think we've only started taking the statistics it's collected, determining what they mean, and acting on that information.
The most obvious thing we can use is the very regular pattern of the week. Mondays or Tuesdays are always our best days (unless there's a holiday), so if we want a timely blog post to see the most people in the shortest amount of time, it makes sense to post it in the beginning of the week.
I also keep fairly good track of the languages of visitors of our site. We have an extensive volunteer language program trying to translate the site into as many languages as possible. It's nice to see which languages are good candidates to be added next, or to see if the work done thus far has seen an audience.
Our resource centers (like the Nonprofit FAQ, HR Resource Center, etc.) can also use the statistics to improve the quality of their site structure. If they see that lots of people are clicking on a particular section of the resource center, they can decide to make it even easier for a visitor to find, since it is obviously popular. On the other hand, if a great resource exists but nobody seems to go there, they can try highlighting it in a different way to determine if it was a findability issue or the content just isn't as engaging as they thought. :) This hasn't happened yet in practice, but it's something we're looking at in the future.
GA, and stats in general, also kind of serve as a basic feedback tool. We have stats (not on GA) that we can compare these stats to to determine if this week was better than the one last year. If it was, was it better outside our normal growth pattern? Could that mean it was because we were having start-up meetings around the world and people were drawn to the site? GA can help you get perspective on events like that.
What specific feature(s) do you find most valuable?
One feature that I don't use enough but has enormous potential is the Goals and Funnel Analysis. It's awesome to see where visitors "drop out" of a certain process, like signing up. One of my colleagues in Argentina has started to use it for Idealistas.org and she's inspired me to take another look at it and set up some goals of my own.
Top Content is another feature that is extremely valuable. It's really simple, it just shows you how much traffic any particular page on the site gets. But when you want to see if this resource center home page is seeing traffic or determining which of the header navigation links get visited the most, it's the tool to use.
Other features I use frequently are: Languages, Geo Location, Geo Map Overlay, and Browser. Very basic tools, but useful for an international site with a wide variety of visitors.
Any words of wisdom to other nonprofits are just beginning to use a tool like GA?
I would caution against drawing strong conclusions from some of the statistics offered on GA. The Goals and Funnel Analysis feature is pretty safe, but trying to understand why your site had higher than average exits this week can be a dangerous and unproductive guessing game. It could have everything to do with a new headline and article on your home page, or it could be something completely different. Stats are better for long term trends or very short events (like measuring a "digg effect" or getting Tech Crunched). It's harder to find correlations between incremental site changes and the ebb and flow of web traffic.
Also... this is kind of easy to figure out, but Google Analytics only updates it's stats once or twice a day. That means there's no excuse for compulsive stats checking! It's likely going to be the exact same set of statistics when you check it again five minutes later. :)
If you have a story about how you have used web analytics and discovered actionable information and would like to leave a message, please do! If you have a screenshot you'd like to contribute, you can send it to this group in flickr!
UPDATE: I asked for some feedback ..buy his book!
I read through your excellent screencast on GA, it was thoroughly researched, great job. I could not believe how many different sources you had combed through.
Thanks for the feedback.
-Avinash.
--
Blog- Occam's Razor @ www.kaushik.net/avinash
Book- Web Analytics: An Hour a Day @ www.snipurl.com/wahour
Very nice. I'm going to need to follow the links for sure.
On #4 I think one of the best metrics is "depth of visit". Couple depth of visit with referring source, and it doesn't take you long to figure out that spending a lot of time on top-down navigation is mostly a waste of time.
Too many people are still wanting to "manage" the visitors experience, and I think these two metrics speak to the ways that the Web is changing.
Also, you might want to work in RSS to the presentation somewhere. Counting people in the age of syndication is never going to be a precise indicator of how the content is being consumed. It's never going to be too accurate so maybe it shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Posted by: Kevin | April 27, 2007 at 04:28 AM
Greatt tip. I'm not sure if I linked to it, but Wiley recently published a book on Google Analytics - by Mary E. Tyler and Jerri Ledford and I found the how-to/explanation of depth of visit reports on page 229. So, I have the how-to, but I'm interested in seeing a real life example - and illustration of intpretation. Do you have --
1. Screenshot of the report
2. Screenshot of web page(s) that tracked depth
or maybe the story of the situation - how having this information made you rethink navigation?
Posted by: Beth Kanter | April 27, 2007 at 05:39 AM
Beth, good read, thank you.
I've had the Techsoup article on my desk for the last few days, so appreciate the extra umph to actually read it.
For the last few years we've (before my time) been using Convio's default tool, AV Stats, which I've found fairly limiting. Anyhow, with the launch of our new site, we're doubling up with Analytics which I've been using with a variety of other sites and like it very much.
My question has to do with your question:
"What percent of my traffic is from search engines? And, is it enough? According to research, approximately 80% of web users use search engines to find sites. What is your benchmark? So, how does your compare?"
From your experience, is there an nonprofit industry benchmark for organically driven traffic? For us, Google/Yahoo/Etc. drives roughly 20-25% of our traffic, and I know we can improve with some easy steps, but I'd like to get an idea of what other folks in the nonprofit sector (ideally green groups) experience.
Thanks sharing as I feel SEO is an often forgotten element of web marketing, even web design.
Best,
Chas
Posted by: Chas | April 27, 2007 at 06:31 AM
Chas,
Your question about nonprofit benchmarks is sooooo important. I don't think there is an industry benchmark so to speak.
I found those particular questions from reading Avinash Kaushik's and listening to his podcasts. He mentioned the 80% of users number, but not the source.
I have some questions back to you.
What is the definition of organic traffic? I'm sure it isn't web visitors who shop at Whole Foods :-)
It is interesting -- for my blog like 60% or so of my traffic comes from search engines. I wonder if it is because blogs place higher in search engines?
What steps will you take to up your search engine traffic?
And, would you willing to send me screenshots of your reports and site - related to search engine referrals? See the flickr group and audio. Thanks for the feedback
Posted by: Beth Kanter | April 27, 2007 at 06:58 AM
Beth,
What I mean by organic traffic may be loose in interpretation, but all search engine referrals.
What are we attempting to do to up our search engine traffic?
Well, a few things we've done to date:
- use google's webmaster tools to basically *claim* our site (verify and site map). Also claimed our blog on technorati.
- google ad words (Ok, paid performance, but for sake of the conversation, I'm lumping it together)
- review & replenish existing meta data.
- create some good online synergy with a wiki glossary and blog.
I know there is much more that can be done with optimizing our site(s), and now with the redesign complete, we're starting to devote more time to it. A little late I know with a redesigned site launched, but better late than never, right?
Posted by: Chas | April 27, 2007 at 07:53 AM
Beth -- I really would love you to hone in on the campaigns that GA allows you to run so to test marketing, messaging, site and page architecture, etc. The overarching message is, of course, for a nponprofit is that all behaviour online should be informed by data - there is really no excuse to letting anything online that an org does that is not tracked in some way and evaluated for effectiveness. If you can hone in on how GA can help you do that, that would be great.
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