Measuring What Matters with Google Analytics

Measuring What Matters with Google Analytics

Facilitator: Sima Thakkar, Senior Manager Content, TechSoup Global Chat Assistants: Zerreen Kazi, Marketing Associate, TechSoup

Slide 1: Measuring What Matters with Google Analytics

Sima: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar Measuring What Matters with Google

Analytics.

Slide 2: Using ReadyTalk

Before we get started, I just want to go over a few housekeeping items.

So all callers will be muted. If you have questions feel free to use the chat box that you see on the left-hand side of your screen.

If you have to drop off early or if you want to watch the webinar again, we will be sending out an email with the

presentation, the recording, and any relevant links. If you lose your Internet connection, just refresh your browser using the link that was emailed to you.

If you are on social media feel free to tweet at us @TechSoup using #tswebinars. But like I said earlier, we will be using the chat box that you see on the left-hand side of your screen.

Slide 3: A Global Network Bridging Tech Solutions and Services for Good

So just a little bit about TechSoup. We are located in 236 countries and territories. We serve over a million nonprofits around the world offering donated or discounted technology.

Slide 4: Corporate Partners

We make our mission possible because we partner with several technology organizations like Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, and several others that you see here.

If you are interested in finding out if your nonprofit is eligible, my colleague Zerreen just messaged out the link, if you're interested in seeing if you are eligible to get product donations.

Slide 5: TechSoup Solutions for Nonprofits

In addition to donated and discounted products, we also offer tech consulting, technology services, training, apps4change, and then information and resources.

Slide 6: Gotta Get Google Analytics with TechSoup Courses

are interested in taking the full course after today's webinar, we do have a 10% discount off of your first course which you see here. And then my colleague Zerreen will also be messaging it out and we will include an email as well.

Slide 7: Presenters

So before I get started, I just want to make sure that you guys can hear me okay. So if you don't mind just chatting in where you are calling in from and I will read a few of them out just to make sure you guys can hear me.

All right, so we have Cambridge, Portland, Albany. Let's see, Maryland, Houston, North Carolina. Okay, cool. So it seems like you guys are calling in from all over the place and you can hear me okay.

So I'm going to go ahead and make introductions. So my name is Sima Thakkar and I am the Senior Manager of Content here at TechSoup. I have with me Zerreen Kazi who is the Marketing Associate here at TechSoup and she will be

helping out on the backend.

And then we have today's presenter who is Jack Downs. And he is the Digital Analyst Whaler at Whole Whale. Originally from landlocked Oklahoma, Digital Analyst Jack Downs is excited to be swimming with Whole Whale. Working in analytics enables Jack to leverage thinking and data for good, creating a space to problem solve and craft strategies for maximizing impact. Jack is Google Analytics certified and loves advocating for data by hosting webinars, leading analytics courses with TechSoup, and developing analytics karate, a gamified approach to mastering Google Analytics. In addition to his work with the analytics team, Jack has enjoyed managing projects with the United Service Organizations, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Lung Cancer Foundation of America, and National Aphasia

Association.

So I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Jack.

Jack: Great, thank you for that introduction. This webinar is an introduction, general overview to Google Analytics.

Slide 8: Overview

And we will begin by putting web analytics in context by looking at the conflict of impact mapping. So that's the idea of taking the metrics that matter most to your organization and putting them in a framework to help you understand how the work you do [indistinct] the outcomes you would like your organization to achieve over a period of time.

So from impact mapping we will move into Google Analytics, web analytics, and the idea of tracking users on your [indistinct] to understanding their behavior to fine-tune strategies and ultimately increase or maximize outcomes.

Then we will talk about making the data accessible. So using Google Analytics and other tools to bundle information for automatic delivery to you and your team members.

And then we will open up on the last 15 to 20 minutes of our presentation today for questions. So if you have questions as we move through this deck, write them down and we can work through those at the end.

Sima: Hey Jack, sorry to interrupt. We are getting some feedback that it's a little bit hard to hear. Can you maybe speak

a little bit closer to the microphone?

Jack: Yeah, how about now? Sima: Yeah, I think that's better.

Jack: Okay, great. I apologize for being soft-spoken.

So a quick overview. We will move from impact mapping to leveraging Google Analytics, talk about dashboards and making data accessible to you and your team. And then that last 20 minutes we will leave open for questions.

Slide 9: Who are we?

Once again, I'm Jack Downs. I'm a Digital Analyst Whaler at Whole Whale. We take our titles very seriously. I've managed analytics for over 30 clients so this is familiar territory. And as she mentioned, I'm Google Analytics certified which I would encourage all of you after today's course if you are interested in more about Google Analytics to pursue that certification process. It's free and it takes only a few hours. It looks great on a resume.

Slide 10: Who is Whole Whale?

[indistinct] Whole Whale. We are a digital agency that leverages data and technology to increase the impact of nonprofits.

Slide 11: Some of our clients

And we had the privilege of working with a lot of cool organizations in our almost 10 years of operation including: Planned Parenthood, Peter G Peterson foundation, and Greater Than AIDS.

Slide 12: Case study: Greater Than AIDS

Greater Than AIDS is an organization that we did a lot of Google Analytics optimization work with. Their purpose is to increase knowledge and understanding of HIV and AIDS, providing resources to inform treatments and to prevent the spread of that disease. We equipped GTA with advanced tracking in Google Analytics to guide their national ad campaigns. And they seem pretty exceptional success with their team and the ability to [indistinct] data analysis.

Slide 13: Case study Power Poetry

Power Poetry, which is an online community where you can, where teens can share poetry. The organization has an ultimate goal of improving young adult literacy. And so poetry is kind of the medium for increasing that interaction with that engagement with literature and poetry.

We helped Power Poetry again, established Google Analytics and set up advanced tracking so that they can better understand how they were acquiring users. And using that information, they were able to fine-tune their digital strategy and are now the largest online teen poetry databases with over 300,000 uploaded poems.

Slide 14: Linking digital outputs and outcomes

So with both of those clients, Power Poetry and Greater Than AIDS, and then with all of the clients that we work with, we first listen to them [indistinct] of outputs and outcomes so the idea of what we do, what we hope to achieve, or the impact that we hope to create.

So Google Analytics is important because so often there is a gap, a knowledge gap, between the ability to see the work that we do on a day-to-day basis and our ability to measure how our work affects real change. There is a number of steps in between actually doing the work, creating online resources, curating a website, reaching out to potential volunteers. And that work, [indistinct] manifests in real life changed.

Web analytics gives us the tools to bridge that gap and to understand how we can fine-tune our digital strategy to better optimize online user experiences and to target new potential volunteers or donors. So we ultimately have a clear idea of how well we are achieving our goals and to increase our chances of building on that growth year-over-year.

Slide 15: Leap of Reason

Without that infrastructure in place that web analytics infrastructure in place, we get back to this idea of we're lost, but at least we're making great time. So you might have an idea of how well you are doing as an organization, but without the data to backup your work or to take a closer look at the work you are doing it a month-to-month rate or year-over-year, then it's really your best guess as to how we are able to kind of optimize that online strategy, that digital strategy moving forward.

So data fills in that gap and allows you to make data backed decisions, data backed guesses, and really fine-tune any kind of work you are doing in social media, or in producing content reaching out to donors over email, etc.

The first step is impact mapping which is a nice starting point for identifying your organization's outputs and outcomes. And then establishing a framework for measuring your success and actually achieving those outcomes.

Slide 16: How do we measure impact?

So we begin with two critical questions, the what and the how? What are we trying to change in this world and how are we going to do it? So what are we do and how are we going to do it? And then more importantly, how are we going to measure that change? So that's where web analytics comes into play.

Slide 17: 1. Define Purpose and Intent

I have four steps here that I would encourage you, as a bit of homework, to work through yourself for your own organization just so that you can begin conceptualizing how your work as an organization can map onto web analytics framework.

This first step is defining purpose and intent. So identifying kind of from that 30,000 foot view, what is the long-term purpose of your goal? What need in society drove the creation of your organization? And especially long-term kind of thought exercise, what would need to happen for us to successfully go out of business?

So for an organization like Greater Than AIDS who hope to spread resources for the treatment of AIDS and the

prevention of its spread, the long-term goal would be a total eradication of the disease. So that's what it would look like for that organization. But just specifically, quote go out of business.

And then define the intended impact. So who benefits from your organization and how do you define success with that audience in mind?

So as we move through this deck maybe jot down a few ideas.

Slide 18: 2. Determine Outcomes and Indicators

The next piece is determining outcomes and indicators. So what specific changes and outcomes will demonstrate the success you have outlined for your organization? So this could be something like total number of social media followers, or total number of registered volunteers, your email list, the total volume of people engaging with the resources that you've included on your website.

Or it could be something a bit more macro, so [indistinct], total number of donations or revenue in the given year. Or if you are generating services for individuals, the total number of individuals helped in a specific period of time.

And then thinking about how you can measure those specific metrics with any number of tools to fine-tune [indistinct]any efforts that you and your organization [indistinct]. Goals for measuring [indistinct].

Slide 19: "Smart" Indicators on Online Success

About indicators, [indistinct]smart, so especially as it pertains to web analytics. We want those kinds of pieces that we measure in real-time to be smart. "Smart" is an acronym for specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time bound. So as we are thinking about why we have a website and what makes investing in that website worthwhile, we come up with a few key indicators like total volume of users engaging with your website in a period of time. Users is a smart indicator because it is specific, it's measurable using a tool like Google Analytics. It's actionable meaning if we see a decrease in the number of users, we know that we need to double down on the most successful acquisition strategies. It's relevant because user data can be translated into real world outcomes. And it's time bound, so we are able to look at a period of time specifically that we had X number of users.

Slide 20: 3. Track Indicators overtime

And then once we have the idea of what those indicators are in mind, we look to specific tools again to track those pieces over time; choosing methods that are both qualitative and quantitative.

So web analytics gives you a sense of not only the volume of users that are engaging with your online resources, but also gives you tools to engage how well that engagement actually is or how strong that engagement actually is. Are people finding your resources meaningful or helpful? Are they watching any videos that you share on social media? Are they downloading resources that you've included on your website?

And then decide how often you will measure each indicator as well.

So once all those pieces are in place, once you've identified what is the most important data for your organization in terms of engaging ongoing success, once you've determined the best metrics for kind of measuring that data over time and how you will approach measuring those data in the next year or two, then we can transfer all of that information on to our framework like the final of engagement to organize each of those data points.

Slide 21: 4. Organize measures of success

So again, in doing this we are creating a framework for making sense of the data available to us in Google Analytics. And we will move on to the platform in just a second so that we can see what this looks like in real time.

But it's important to take a step back and think about why understanding total volume of users on your site is relevant for your organization, what does that mean to have 100 people visit your website in a week? And how can we refine our social media strategy or our on line ads to increase that number over time and to really activate those users?

So I've done a mockup here of what this looks like for an organization called Defeat Cancer. So this is a made up organization and their goal is to provide the best in class resources for users who are have loved ones with cancer, or have interest in understanding the symptoms of specific types of cancers, etc.

Slide 22: Funnel of Digital Engagement

We use this framework called the "funnel of engagement" to help this organization understand how web data can illustrate movement from just general awareness about an organization, like defeat cancer, to actual commitment to the organization.

So that top piece would be like potential donors know about defeat cancer. The second would be those users are browsing content, or using your website in some kind of meaningful way, engaging with the social media posts. And then finally [indistinct]kind of takes that top level action that you might ask for on your website or just [indistinct].

So thinking about those metrics or indicators for Defeat Cancer, some of those metrics might be the total number of users visiting your site, or the total number of users who are visiting your resources that provide information about specific types of cancer or symptoms.

As that engagement gets more refined at the engagement level, we might think about indicators that indicate some kind of meaningful engagement or ongoing interest in connecting with the organization so subscribing for a newsletter, or returning to the site within a handful of times, or more than one time over a set period months or weeks.

And then finally as we get a bit more specific thinking about those indicators and what really [result] in affecting overall change for your organization, we have actionable indicators like donations, shares of social media of contents, or filling out some kind of volunteer form on your site.

Overall, this leads to kind of those key outcomes for the organization. So as you can see illustrated by this funnel, we move from general awareness of a user to engaging with your resources or with your website in some kind of

meaningful way, to finally providing information or donor dollars, and then ultimately being committed to your organization in a tangible way. And at this level that's where we start to see this kind of organizational outcomes realized.

So this creates or bridges that gap between what we do to create an online experience and the outcomes we hope to achieve in real life.

As part of this broader process of gathering data, asking questions, analyzing those specific steps that a user might make, drawing insights on how to increase the number of people [indistinct]time or who are signing up for your

newsletter. And then finally fine-tuning any kind of efforts that you make to reach new users, making those adjustments and then using the data again to see how well those changes affected change on your website.

This is where Google Analytics comes into play. So now that we've thought a little bit about what measuring success for your organization looks like, we can map out those indicators onto Google Analytics and actually see how well we are performing in our digital online spaces month-to-month.

So just for a quick introduction.

Slide 23: What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic. And it runs behind the scenes on every page of your site.

I moving to Google Analytics just for a quick preview just so we can see what this looks like in real time.

Demo: Google Analytics Dashboard

So here's Google Analytics for Power Poetry and we have the last quarter's worth of data.

So immediately, we can see some of those key indicators that we called out when we started thinking about the metrics and [indistinct]in terms of gauging organizational success.

So in the last quarter, Power Poetry had just over 1 million users. Those users stayed on site for almost 2 minutes on average. They visited nearly 2 pages on average. And they bounced from the site at a rate of 42%. So to bounce means to open up a webpage and to exit before taking any kind of meaningful action. So we don't want users to bounce. A bounce rate of about 42% is pretty strong for a website with that kind of user journey that Power Poetry does where people are asked to take some [indistinct] action like writing a poem and publishing it to the site.

From this user overview, we can apply data comparisons. So I'm going to compare the last quarter to the previous period or to Q4 2018. And using Google Analytics, we can see immediately how well we are doing compared to our own

internal benchmarks.

So comparing Q1 2019 to Q4 2018, we see that there were 30% more users roughly on-site. And that measures the engagement like bounce rate and average session duration decreased marginally. So from Power Poetry's perspective, this would be a successful first quarter of the year.

Their organization looks at indicators like total users and bounce rate to gauge how well they are curating users at that awareness level, whether just where it's all about name recognition and getting resources and the opportunity to sign up and post poetry in front of potential audiences. New teens that will ultimately then take that next step that engage level step of signing up and becoming a regular user.

Demo: Google Analytics: Reports

Within Google Analytics one of the most important reports is a user acquisition Channels report here. So again, this is just an overview and we could talk about the specifics of utilizing this data in just a bit. But for a quick demonstration, we will move into the Channels report and see how Power Poetry is acquiring new users across any number of channels. So we can see that in the first quarter of the year, 81% of their users came through organic search or through search engines. Another 9% of users roughly access the site by inputting the URL directly into the bar at the top so that's direct traffic. And then Paid Search, so this is any kind of paid advertisement on Facebook or Google Ads is accounting for about 6 ½% of traffic.

So moving back to those kind of key indicators or the ability to track the success of an organization over time using web analytics, we can use this information to get a sense of where that growth stemmed from.

So Power Poetry had a 30% growth in one quarters time in terms of online web presence. Where did that come from? And according to the Channels report, Power Poetry knows that a majority of that traffic is coming from Google search or Yahoo search or Bing. Again fine-tuned strategies by producing more resources or post to build on that organic traffic.

If they were an organization that leveraged social media in a meaningful way, they might learn to see that like the percentage of social traffic is rather low and this could be an indicator to build on that first quarter of growth that directing adwords to social media could be a strong opportunity.

Moving through this demonstration, we can also look at user demographics and location. Power Poetry is an international organization. So we see users around the world with just over half coming from United States.

If you click into any of these options here just like in other reports, we can drill down into the data to see more specific actionable data that can inform say, advertising strategies or actual like on the ground outreach.

So comparing periods of time, Google Analytics offers these easy visualizations. And we will move into Metro area. So we are Power Poetry, we can using this reports very quickly visualize where our pockets of users are concentrated. So strong presence in Dallas, New York, Chicago, other large metro areas around the country.

Google Analytics also shows where users are spending time on your site. So within the Behavior report, we can access All Pages to get a sense of where users are engaging with your content or what posts are resonating especially with your audiences.

So for Power Poetry about 4% are landing on this poetry dictionary. And then there's some outstanding post added by individuals that are really driving traffic and capturing user interests.

Finally, Google Analytics offers the opportunity to create goals which are specific actions that users can take on your site like donations, or signing up to be a volunteer, or adding in a new poem, in the case of Power Poetry. And you can

track those specific meaningful actions that will move the needle for your organization within those goals report. So in the last quarter as a measure of success, we see a 13% increase in new poet registries for Power Poetry. And then some interest in adding new poems from existing users as well.

So you can think about some of those key indicators that I asked you to ideate at the top, what ultimately represents success for your organization when it comes to your online strategy and what you are doing with your website and with your social media accounts? And this is where we would want to represent those indicators or to include those indicators like donations, like volunteers, etc.

So just by clicking around on five separate reports, hopefully, you get a sense of the capacity that we have within Google Analytics to really understand what is going on on our site in any given period of time and to derive useful insights from this data.

Moving back into our deck, we can talk more about specific use cases for Google Analytics.

Slide 24: Asking the right questions

So as you can see there are hundreds of reporting options within Google Analytics. And to make the most of the data, you want to ask targeted questions to understand within the 20 to 30 minutes that you might have in a given week or month to really invest in your Google Analytics account, what's going on or how you can best refine your online strategy based on the last month's level of activity?

So I have a few guiding questions that we like to work on with our organizations or organizations that we work with. The key one being, how has traffic changed in the last month? So as we saw in that audience overview report, it's pretty easy to visualize those changes by just a few minutes of analysis of that top-level page.

Slide 25: Some metrics that matter

I've included here just some clarifying definitions of the metrics that are kind of the most primary within Google

Analytics. So there are things like users and sessions, concepts that might seem related or indistinguishable but there is a key difference.

The one being that users are unique individuals or machines that are accessing your site. I say machine because one user might have an iPhone and a computer and are engaging with your resources in an ongoing way. In that instance, the iPhone and the computer will be construed as different users.

Sessions on the other hand, are just the total number of times that all of those users are visiting your site in a given period.

We look at the idea of most of the traffic quantity and quality, so making sure that we are also measuring how strong of an engagement our users are having on site. So bounce rate, as I mentioned, are the percentage of people who leave without clicking around or logging some kind of meaningful action.

And then goal completion rate, in Google Analytics especially, is an extremely valuable metric for appraising your online success for the last quarter or two. Goal completion rate is a percentage of visits, so total number of sessions that result in some kind of meaningful goal conversion. So how many users in the last month ended up donating, or ended up signing up for my newsletter, ended up registering to volunteer, etc.?

Slide 26: Audience overview

The audience overview report that we just called out, provides that bird eye view of traffic and how it's changed from period to period and gives you the tools to quickly answer that first question, what's happening in our account?

Next up is who is our audience? So understanding demographic breakdown of your audience both by gender, age, location gives you the tools you need to effectively spend any kind of ad budget that you have allocated for Facebook ads, or Google ads, or YouTube, etc. It also gives you a clear idea of how to customize messaging or the content that you share to your site to target interest for specific demographic groups.

Slide 27: Demographic reporting

In Google Analytics, it's important to enable demographics and interest reports. So if you have a Google Analytics account already, make sure you move into the properties settings within your admin level view within the account to enable this demographic tracking.

And I will note that Google approximates audience age and gender relying on past search behavior to make the best guess to just the general audience breakdown. We have found in our experience that this approximation is pretty

reliable, but it is a caveat if there is any kind of reporting that is tethered to grants or other considerations that you might rely on that information to be exact.

Within Google Analytics that demographic reporting looks a lot like this. So you see percentage of users broken out by age cohort. And within this kind of report, you can see very easily how engagement varies by age level. You can see changes in bounce rate as users get a bit older.

You see that the youngest users for Power Poetry here are spending the longest time on average with three minutes about for an average session duration. Power Poetry hopes to target teens or users directly out of college, or event teachers who are using this tool to facilitate inter-classroom poetry creation. So seeing a bulk of their users between 18 and 44 that's sweet spot between students and teachers is encouraging for Power Poetry.

And looking at how engagement varies within that Bounce Rate column, pages per session column, and Average Session Duration gives them the tools they need to figure out how to fine-tune the user journeys that are laid out for say students who they want to ulitimatley post, and teachers who the ultimate goal is to have them bring this tool into the classroom.

Next question is what is the best way to reach new users? So we looked at the acquisition report just like this.

Slide 28: Introduction to user acquisition

For Power Poetry, 71% of all users are coming from organic search so that's again search engines. Within Google Analytics, sources of traffic so specifics search engines, or specifics websites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, The New York Times, etc. are organized in channels. So traffic channels by Google are conveniently sorted for comparison. But if you click within any of these tabs, you can see a full list of all the sites that are sending users to your traffic that fall underneath those broader categories.

Slide 29: Study Google Ads performance

So those categories include paid search which one of those primary sources of paid search would be Google Ads. So if you are running any kind of paid efforts within Google search, where you are promoting certain links to rank or keywords within the Google Ads platform, you can track that data within specificity with the Google Analytics platform, as well as other ad data like from Facebook.

Google take that one step further however with Google Ads performance data because you are able to link the Google Ads account directly with your Google Analytics account creating a seamless integration. And really giving you like a leg above competition in terms of understanding how ad dollars drive goal conversions or other meaningful

Slide 30: Analyze traffic by landing page

Within Google Analytics, we also like to analyze traffic by landing page. So a landing page is the first page that a user sees when they visit your site. This varies from user to user. It just depends on how they are finding your site initially. If it's social media, then the link that you have shared as an organization will be the landing page. If it's in Google search, whatever that particular user has inputted into the search bar will result in maybe a different page aside from your homepage or other key resources.

Understanding how engagement varies at the landing page level gives you the opportunity to refine your digital marketing strategies to promote pages that do a great job of activating new users. And to potentially refine or change pages that let's say have a high bounce rate or that are least likely to convert a donor or volunteer registration.

Finally, we like to think about how we define the most important user's behaviors? So calling back to that framework at the top, impact mapping when we are thinking about the key indicators and how we can measure let's say engagement with blog posts, or shares on social media, or donations, or volunteer registrations overtime. Google Analytics provides us the opportunity to really customize the account using two key tools.

Slide 31: Tracking user behavior

The first is Google Analytics events. So these are any actions that a user might take on site that are automatically tracked within Google Analytics. So out-of-the-box Google Analytics will pull page view data so where users are spending time on your site, give you a sense of how long they are staying on the website, how often they are bouncing or exiting, and where those actions are happening.

But when it comes to things how deep someone is scrolling, or how many times a user is playing a shared video, or how many times they are registering using some kind of a form that information or that data is up to us to enable within the account.

Using a tool like Google Tag Manager or having a developer will help customize Google Analytics on the back end of your website is the way to include this event data. Again, that specific elevated user behavior data like page scroll, video players, etc. is part of [indistinct] engagements with.

Nonprofits, we use that initial funnel, that impact map, to identify what is most important to track. And then we work in Google Tag Manager to implement the tracking of those key advanced actions. So add even more color to these Google Analytics reports.

Event data can then be elevated to Google Analytics goal data. So we looked at this in that quick walk-through. But goals are critical behaviors and often include things like newsletter sign-ups or shares to social media. These are able to be configured directly with the platform. So if you have key pages that you want users to see, or if you want a user to stay five minutes or more or this other kind of like time threshold that you have in mind represents key engagement, then you can already go into your Google Analytics account and configure goals. So those most important actions, to begin tracking those user behaviors that will ultimately move the needle for your organization.

Goals are something that we like to include in like year-end reporting for the organizations that we work with. If we had a 20% increase in newsletter sign-ups, or a 30% increase in donation revenue year-over-year that says to us that we are doing our job in terms of optimizing digital strategy. And gives the nonprofits the tools to make those calls for

themselves and to refine again any kind of work that they are doing, any kind of time they are investing in a website based on again kind of these key user actions.

So my final point is that essentially you should [indistinct] robust the data is within Google Analytics and potentially how time-consuming it could be to spend actually wading through some of these data on a regular basis. Google provides free tools to make that data a bit more accessible.

So once you have Google Analytics configured on your website and you have an idea of what those key performance indicators are, you can then take all of those key pieces and organize them in a data dashboard that can be scheduled for automatic delivery to your team or to your own inbox to make data informed decision-making that much easier. So rather than having to log on to the platform and make sense of the reports on your own, you can facilitate that kind of ongoing analysis using a tool like data like dashboard analytics or Data Studio dashboards.

So Google Data Studio is another premium tool offered by Google. It integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics so transferring information from one platform to another is quite easy. [indistinct] bite sized reports to be customized and scheduled, like I said, for automatic delivery.

And icing on the cake is that they are generally quite stunning data visualization that can like be presented to your board or shared with other stakeholders in a very polished professional way.

So I will click into our own Data Studio template which we will link to in a follow-up. Just to give you an idea of what this looks like.

Demo: Google Data Studio

So in this report, you can see some of those key pieces for Power Poetry delivered in a bit more digestible way. So Sessions and Users are key measures of success. They want to know how many teens are accessing their site. And they have Bounce Rate, Goal Completions.

And as we scroll over widgets, you can see how it's interactive. We can set a date range and compare time periods. And then from the overview page, we get even more specifics. Here's a demographics dashboard.

Google Ads, so Power Poetry is running almost $40,000 of Google Ads like every month. So this is how they can really appraise the success of those efforts.

Organic search, so how well we are providing content that users finding and looking for resources in Google search and how well those searches are resonating with those users.

And then finally, social media. So how does engagement vary by social media platform, when it's the best time to post based on total volume of users and their likelihood to complete one of those key actions that we defined as goals both for day and time.

So this is a tool that you would be interested in customizing for your organization [indistinct] or substitute the data currently link to each of these pieces with your own.

The other option is looking at dashboard within Google Analytics. So this is a smaller scale opportunity to build out custom dashboard data reports for your team. They can also be automatically delivered to various stakeholders using email.

Slide 33: What's new in Google Analytics?

Just a quick note for those users interested or do have existing familiarity with the tool, in the last year or so there have been a number of key changes on the platform. So users for example are now a primary metric in Google Analytics and this affects a number of key traffic reports.

There has been a rise in dark social media traffic. So this is users who share resources or links over iMessage, or

WhatsApp, or other peer-to-peer communication tools. And this has increased the overall direct volume of traffic within the channel support.

And then finally, we have enhanced opportunities to really package and visualize this data within Google Data Studio. So we can touch on each of these pieces for users interested in learning a bit more in next weeks Google Analytics refresher course.

Slide 34: Questions?

Now, I would like to open up the floor for questions, whether it be about impact mapping and how to best establish that kind of framework for your own organization? I can toggle back to certain slides if we need any clarification, or if you have a question about Google Analytics functionality, or want to dig into a specific report just let us know.

Sima: All right. Thank you, Jack. So we definitely have a few questions that have come in. So the first question is about

the Data Studio. Is that a free tool and is that accessible by everybody?

Jack: Yes, so Data Studio is a free tool. It wasn't always free. Google within the last year or two made that extension of

their Google Suite free to users. [indistinct] 360 level which is for much larger organization.

But it is highly customizable and intuitive to use. So I would encourage as a follow-up to this webinar, especially if someone has Google Analytics already installed, to log into Google data studio using just your Gmail login and begin playing around with how you can organize data.

I will call out that not only can you — don't have to just rely on Google Analytics data for Data Studio. If you organize information in a Google Sheet report or other third-party platforms, it's easy to input that data as well for easy

visualization. It's a really outstanding tool.

Sima: Okay. We got a question from Elaine, what is a normal or accessible bounce rate for a nonprofit? Jack: Sure. So bounce rates do depend on the kind of website that you are.

So if you are producing a lot of content and your objective is to incentivize your searchers to click through a number of pages on your site, explore say in the case of Defeat Cancer or hypothetical organization, they want users to look at symptoms and then potentially click through to understand more information about specific types of cancer, or like seeking treatment. That bounce rate will need to be far lower than say an organization that is driving users to take some kind of off-site action or off-line action or website that serves more like a pamphlet than an actual kind of repository for posts, blog post, resources, etc.

So for one of those content heavy sites, I would say shoot for anywhere between 10% to 30% for a target bounce rate. And if your site serves more of a brochure for your organization where there's just key information, you are directing users to sign up to kind of take action off-line, or if you have a majority of your online presence on social media or elsewhere off of your primary domain, then a bounce rate between 40% and 60% is a bit more acceptable.

Sima: Perfect, okay. We got another question from Robin. Can you see what search terms they were using in their

organic search that brought them to the website?

Jack: Yes. I will go ahead and share my screen again. I'm going to go look at this in Power Poetry. So within the

Acquisition report back in this kind of Channels overview where we can kind of break down by source, we will click into Organic Search. And then look at this traffic organized not by source but by keyword.

So we will let this load real quick. And I'm going to toggle off this time comparison so we have fewer data points to comb through.

So here we can see all of this organic search data organized by keyword. Within Google Analytics, a lot of this information is proprietary so not provided is going to be information withheld by Google Analytics. So this isn't ideal but we can extrapolate what we know or extrapolate the keywords that are included to get a sense of what content really is resonating.

The percentage of users who are searching around the top terms that are listed, in our experience, is much higher than indicated here. This report is just skewed by Google's own preferences to incentivize potentially the use of the ads program instead.

We have two alternatives to this report that I would like to call out. The first is landing page. So organic landing pages are going to be the strongest approximation of the groups of keywords that users are searching for to find a particular resource. So "poetry dictionary" is Power Poetry's top landing page.

So if we were to click on to this resource, we could pull out key terms used throughout like dictionary, poetry, key, like definitions included within that resource. And deduce based on just user behavior seen in Google Analytics. But there is high search volume around like language associated with this particular resource.

From Google Search Console, which is another tool that we can seamlessly integrate with Google Analytics, we can get specific information directly from that platform brought into Google Analytics to provide a bit more clarity. So this is like a third space where we can kind of approximate that user search behavior.

So whereas a lot of this information was withheld or blurred within the channel's report, if we link our Search Console which is another free tool by Google Analytics. It just takes a few minutes to configure for your own organization. We can see specific search volume for key terms.

So we saw terms like "slam poetry" and "blackout poetry" on within the organic search reports and ad associated traffic. But here we can see the actual total click through rate, how we are ranking for the search term in the top page of Google search, total volume of impressions. So for something like slam poetry, we are getting our resources in front of almost 100,000 users in over a quarters time.

And this can be useful in terms of guiding ongoing search engine optimization, making sure that all pieces that are relevant for slam poetry or all related search terms are optimized to show up in that top position of Google search.

Sima: Okay, perfect. So I think we have time for about one more question. Someone was asking is there kind of a

tipping a point when it is good to start using Google Analytics? Or you know, somebody doesn't have a lot of traffic does that mean it's not really worth it? Or do you think it's good to just start from the get-go? Is there a specific number of visitors that you think a website should have for it to kind of interesting data?

Jack: Sure, that's a good question.

For websites with a small volume demographic, it may not seem like it makes sense to like invest the time to kind of monthly, weekly, and also within Google Analytics since there's going to be such little change in terms of number of users and the actions that they are actually taking. But by installing Google Analytics as early as you can, you can track growth over time. And while you may only have a couple hundred users visiting a month or couple months span, it still establishes some internal benchmarks to beat as you continue to optimize digital strategy, your digital presence, and then ultimately grow.

So I would suggest that [indistinct] part of the implementing. And then maybe just adjusting kind of like a set interval or engagement with that data like every few months or so since the volume of user data is going to be pretty limited. Yeah, I think that a tool like Data Studio, too could help automate that ongoing analysis so it would be a nice companion piece.

And then if you also rely on any kind of ad spend. So if you are promoting post on Facebook, or if you are using money in Google Ads, or want to invest in a new like CRM, you can rely on Google Analytics data to produce results or like

prove that those efforts are like resulting in site traffic, meaningful engagement with your content to people who might control those budgets, or to people who might be able to allocate a bit more money to invest in those kind of different strategies.

Slide 35: Next steps

Sima: Okay, perfect. So it looks like we are getting close to time. And it seems like you have offered your email here

for those of you who didn't get your questions answered. So if you still have follow-up questions feel free to email Jack and that's okay? Right, Jack?

Jack: That would be great.

Slide 36: Gotta get Google Analytics with TechSoup courses

Sima: Okay, perfect. All right. So like I said earlier, Jack is doing a follow-up course with TechSoup courses. And you

can see the full list here. If you guys are interested in signing up for a more detailed follow-up and learning about Google Analytics, the link will be messaged out by my colleague Zerreen.

And if you are taking a TechSoup course for the first time, you can use this promo code to get 10% off your first course.

Slide 37: Share and Learn

If you guys don't mind, when you leave today's webinar, we have a post event survey. So any feedback that you have for us is always super helpful.

If you are on social media, feel free to give us a follow. We are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. And feel free to visit our blog, we post a lot of helpful tips and trick on our blog at blog.TechSoup.org.

Slide 38: Join us for our upcoming webinars

And we have one more webinar that I'm actually presenting next week which is Your Guide to Content Marketing for Nonprofits. So if you guys are interested in signing up for our upcoming webinars you can find that on our website.

Slide 39: Thank You to Our Webinar Sponsor

All right. So I'm going to go ahead and close out today's webinar. Thank you so much Jack for the detailed presentation. Thank you to Zerreen and Meredith for helping on the back end. And thank you to our audience for staying on for the full hour. And to our sponsor ReadyTalk. And we hope to see you guys on the next webinar.