ISBI CONFERENCE GOOGLE ANALYTICS PRESENTATION ADDITIONAL NOTES

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1 Telephone: Fax: +44 (0) ISBI CONFERENCE GOOGLE ANALYTICS PRESENTATION ADDITIONAL NOTES Thank you for attending the Google Analytics presentation. We hope the copy of the slides and these additional notes are helpful. These notes mirror the slides but provide a bit more direction we have also included the links to the dashboard reports we have created, as mentioned in the presentation you can load them into your own Google Analytics, scroll down to the URLs and then copy and past them into your browser, having signed into your Google Analytics account. There are also some excellent guidance notes and videos available online to help you further your knowledge following the seminar introduction, see: Please do consider booking to attend the introductory/intermediate and/or advanced Google Analytics seminar(s) run in conjunction with ISBI. I am sure you will find attendance helpful, with the opportunity to go through these topics in much more detail, to discuss how you use Google Analytics (and other analytics), your account set-up, any questions etc etc. There are seminars planned to take place in Ascot, Berkshire (West London) as follows: Thursday 14 January 2016 Google Analytics and Facebook Insights seminar (introductory/intermediate). Wednesday 3 March 2016 Advanced Google Analytics seminar. Places are limited. For details and to book please see: If you have particular questions please us at info@omtac.com, we will help if we can. Best wishes, Matthew Matthew D Arcy, Managing Director, OMTAC Ltd. Sept These EDUCATION DIGITAL MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS GOOGLE ANALYTICS NOTES (version 3conf) have been prepared for the attendees on the conference presentation and sole copyright resides with OMTAC Ltd. Licence is not granted for duplication or distribution to any third party who did not attend said training, whether within or outside the organisation, or for use of these materials produced and published by OMTAC Ltd in presentations, events, training or other activities. Any such use, unauthorised duplication or redistribution is expressly prohibited OMTAC Ltd. OMTAC MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS TRAINING GOOGLE ANALYTCIS SEMINAR NOTES v3conf

2 GOOGLE ANALYTICS PRESENTATION ADDITIONAL NOTES DEVELOPING A DIGITAL MINDSET FOR YOUR SCHOOL COMMUNICATIONS... Marketing Admissions School Life & Community Alumni Relations + Measuring what works, what doesn t work and your ROI with analytics A DIGITAL STRATEGY PRIORITIES? * Integrated Offline & Online Marketing Strategy. * Website targeted, fit for purpose, user-friendly, intuitive, functional, engaging, current (news, blogs), interactive, engaging, relevant, current, multimedia, monitored and managed, ANALYSED * Mobile Web. * Search Engine Optimisation & Online Advertising. * Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn * First contact to First day CRM ( , Events etc). * Measuring, demonstrating, improving with Analytics. SETTING UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS - ACCOUNTS, PROPERTIES & VIEWS * GOOGLE ACCOUNT - one Google account for all websites. * GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA) ACCOUNTS the different websites (domains) you are generating data for. * PROPERTIES normally one property per domain but possibly more, ie. sub-domains that you wish to treat separately to your main site or a separate mobile site. * VIEWS - you may have multiple views per property. Generally one raw unfiltered profile but you may want to set up others excluding visits from your IP address. You can also set up profiles based on geographical data.

3 FILTERED PROFILES vs SEGMENTS * FILTERED PROFILES - can t be changed retrospectively if you set up a profile to exclude visits from outside the UK GA won t keep any data from international visitors. * SEGMENTS - segments can be applied to data to filter them at any time, e.g. you can look at a raw profile and exclude visits from the UK. In summary Filtered profiles mean that data is not collected at all. Using advanced segments on unfiltered profiles will temporally exclude data, but nothing is lost. If in doubt, use segments! ACCOUNTS & PROFILES * ALWAYS - keep a raw unfiltered profile for your domains. * ONE ACCOUNT one account is all you need. * BE ORGANISED - keep things neat and manageable! WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW AND WHY? It is important to identify the questions to ask of our Google Analytics and Facebook Insights for our marketing, admissions and alumni relations communications review and assessment, for developing new activity, for demonstrating ROI etc What do you need to know, to measure, to assess? Why? What do others you report to need to know? Why? GOOGLE ANALYTICS THE BASICS * Become familiar with the basic reports by look at each in turn. * Learn to use Annotations to note what has changed or impacted on statistics on particular dates.

4 * If you have Internal Site Search set-up Google Analytics to monitor your visitors' internal website searches. INTERNAL SITE SEARCH If your website has a site search functionality on it then you can use Google Analytics to monitor what people are searching for. What information are users struggling to find on your site and what kind of content may be missing, ie. things to include on your website? To add site search to an existing profile you need to go to: Admin > View> View Settings From here select Do track Site Search and enter your query parameter. Find out more at: SETTING GOALS Set-up Google Analytics to monitor your website goals. A goal is a significant action taken by someone on your website: * Requesting a demo * Submitting a contact form * Watching a video * Looking at more than X number of pages * Staying on the site for more than X minutes * Downloading a PDF * Viewing a specific page * Requesting a brochure * Voting in a poll * Making a phone call (requires call tracking) EVENTS Four types of Goals:

5 1) Based on a URL visited (e.g. thanks.html after submitting a form) 2) Duration time spent on site 3) Pages/visit number of webpages viewed in the session 4) Events - Events are a way of recording actions not based on page views or time on site. Events are set by adding some Google Analytics code to your webpage to monitor actions that would not normally be tracked by GA. These include views of videos, PDFs or flash files and also clicks on buttons which don t take you to a separate webpage. EVENT TRACKING Problem: GA does not track views to certain types of file by default. The tracking has three main options: * Category can be something like video or in this case PDF. * Action e.g. download or play. * Label This gives more detail on the file/action in question like the name of the PDF or video. So <a href= /file.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackevent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label']);">download PDF</a> Becomes: <a href= /file.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackevent', PDFs', Download', Lukes_PDF']);">download PDF</a> CAMPAIGN TRACKING Links from s, PDFs and other sources that are not web pages will be marked as Direct traffic unless you instruct GA otherwise. Use the Google URL Builder Tool to build URLs for your campaigns. A website that publishes an online PDF version of their magazine: * Campaign Source: Something nice and clear like "Magazine.

6 * Campaign Medium: This should be set as "PDF. * Campaign Name: Used to identify the issue of a mag, ie. "Issue 1. * Campaign Content: This should be a brief description of the link destination, e.g. "homepage. Another example Use the Google URL Builder Tool to build URLs for your campaigns. * Campaign Source: Something nice and clear like Newsletter. * Campaign Medium: This should be set as . * Campaign Name: Used to identify the subject, i.e. June Newsletter. * Campaign Content: This should be a brief description of the link destination, e.g. "homepage" SEGMENTING DATA Use 'Advanced segments' and consider setting up filtered profiles. To get a better idea of how people are using your site you ll want to segment your data. This simply means filtering your audience based on their attributes. Once a segment has been selected, all the data in the report will be based on that segment (until it s deselected or you end your GA session). DASHBOARDS - Set-up and use custom Dashboards' as required to segment/access data. Dashboards are a way of seeing a lot of your data in one place. They can give you a quick but detailed overview of how a website is performing. Dashboards can be set up from scratch or from a pre-prepared template.

7 Customise specific reports for yourself, senior management, governors and others. Different websites have different objectives so may need more than the standard reports to give real insight into how people are using them: * Month by month reporting * Popular blog posts * Visits by time of day * SEO keyword analysis * Referring sites analysis * Advanced audience demographics Simply click on +New Dashboard, choose the Starter Dashboard and then adjust the Widgets as you wish. If you are more confident you could start with Blank Canvas option. BASIC DASHBOARDS TEMPLATES ABOUT AND ACTIONS We have created two basic dashboards for you to use, these will use your data to provide you with two basic dashboards ( About giving details of your visitors and Actions giving details about their behaviour) which you can print or save as PDFs, and which you can have ed to you on a regular basis. (Click on when in a Dashboard report.) To use the two dashboard templates first sign into your Google Analytics account and then use the following links: About Dashboard: Actions Dashboard: You can also find other dashboard reports set up and shared by others by clicking on New Dashboard and then Import from Gallery. A quick search for Google Analytics custom reports will give you a selection of the best prebuilt reports that might be useful for analysing your data:

8 ALERTS AND INTELLIGENCE EVENTS Set up alerts to give you instant feedback on visitor behaviour. Google Analytics Intelligence Events give you insight into the major events triggered by your website traffic. For example, if a page of your site gets a 90% increase in bounce rates this will be flagged here. Intelligence Events occur on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and are given a level of importance. You can set up alerts based on your website events: * Traffic up/down by <10% on the previous week/month * Revenue up/down by <10% on the previous week/month * <X amount of Goals in one day/week * < xxx of revenue in a day/week * Increase of <X% of visits to a certain page OTHER ANALYTICS TOOLS Some other tools you might want to use include: * CrazyEgg heat mapping and scroll mapping * Optimizely A/B testing etc * ClickTale user recordings and form analytics * SocialCrawlytics social shares * Brandwatch/Topsy social mentions

9 * Crowdbooster Twitter reach * Twitonomy Twitter stats * Survey Monkey surveys * Google Trends search trends over time * Visual Website Optimiser a/b testing * Woopra individual user analytics (stalking) * Fivesecondtest simple online user tests and many, many others! REVIEW, ROUND-UPS AND TIPS Some tips to take away * Set up dashboards for an at a glance overview. * Use different views of tables and graphs. * Use GA regularly to get comfortable with it. * Set up Custom Reports if the standard ones don t give what you want. * Set up Goals for your website. * Focus on Goals rather than just Traffic. * Set-up Custom Alerts to stay on top of unexpected events. * Set-up internal site search (if appropriate) to get more insight. * Segment data to get an idea how different visitors use site. * Use GA to get ideas for changes to your site design. * Ask questions or look online, there s lots of help available. * Monitor trends over time, benchmark and aim to improve!