Over two years ago, I made a screencast about Web Analytics for Nonprofits that covered the basics of using google analytics, web metrics, and some nonprofit case studies featuring Laura White and the Idealist. That's just about when I discovered Avinash Kaushik's blog, Occam's Razor and his first book on Web analytics.
I reached out to Avinash and he was very generous with his time, helping us understand traditional web metrics as well as Google Analytics. Through our conversation, we also touched on the metrics for blogs. I've learned a lot about metrics from Avinash.
Avinash has just published his second book, Web Analytics 2.0. It's a desktop bible for anyone who has to gather web analytics data as part of their job. What I like best is that it takes the mystery out of social media metrics. It gets even better: Avinash is donates all proceeds from his books to two charities: The Smile Train and The Ekai Vidyalaya Foundation.
Harry and Sara say "Thank You Avinash" for the Google Schwag!
Avinash Kaushik sent me a copy of his new book and it's so good, I'm keeping it. But, I'm purchasing a copy to giveaway to the reader from a nonprofit who leaves a comment about how they might best use this book. (Don't forget to fill out the comment form completely, so I can track you down if you win.)
I had the pleasure having lunch with Avinash over at the Googleplex. The chapter that caught my curiosity was Chapter 7: Failing Faster - Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation and we discussed it in the video above. He explains why experimentation is critical for success in using the web, particularly social media.
Avinash feels that in a world of finite resources, it is very important to experiment and fail fast. With social media and on the web, experiments are fast, cheap, and scalable. The learning that results is what brings your more success. Experimentation also helps an organization make decisions based on audience feedback and analytics data, not your own hunches. This try it, fix it approach leads to incremental improvements which in turn leads to better outcomes.
The F-word chapter (Failure) offers some really useful tips about creating and nurturing a "experiment culture." I was thrilled to discover this part of the book because I'm designing a learning community/technical project that is based on valuing experimentation. So, been working on a methodology for social media experiments.
While the advice in the book is geared for tests to improve a web site, these are translatable to social media experiments. I've summarized a couple of the tips he offers about methods for testing.
(1)The First Test: KISS: The first experiment should be simple from an idea, execution, and measurement and use A/B method. This is a technique for testing two or more versions.
(2)Just Get Started: Avoid spending so much time trying to design the perfect experiment with the perfect measurement tool that you don't actually implement. Learning means implementation - even if you fail.
(3)Test to Learn, Not Validate Your Gut: Don't think about testing as a way to support a decision that you're making based on your gut. Do it to learn what works or doesn't.
(4) Start with a Hypothesis: Your hypothesis should embed a success metric. For example, "My hypothesis is that our Facebook Fans are more likely to engage with us when we post links that have a question in the title."
(5) Make Goals Evaluation Criteria and Up-Front Decisions: It is important to not only identify your success metric, but also establish the criteria to judge a victory.
(6) Design Tests That Solve A Pain Point for Your Audience: Design your experiments so they address a point of pain for a customer or audience.
(7) Learn, Learn, Learn: If you're going to experiment, you need to analyze your data and learn from it. Even if your social media experiment was a miserable flop, there is a lot of valuable learning.
(8) Evangelism and Expertise: It is important to have someone who can preach and share why testing is important and someone who has the expertise in metrics and data.
Finally, Avinash suggests that testing should be fun!
We recently launched a new blog here at Blackbaud Internet Solutions. It’s been an exciting endeavor and given us a lot of insight into using social media for nonprofits and fundraising! Our main goal is to help you learn how to leverage our technology and the tools that make up social media. With that in mind I’d like to share 4 Keys to Building a Successful Web Site based on similar tactics we’ve deployed on this blog.
Before we go too far, let me start by saying, “Content is King.” Without great content, the following tactics and tools are limited at best. Focus on producing great content all the time. Put these tools in place. Then use what you learn from them to grow your site! Off we go.
1) Learn From Your Content
If you’re not learning you’re getting dumber! Use Google Analytics (GA) to see things like how many unique visitors you’re getting, what content is being viewed the most, what keywords or phrases people are using to find you and where people are coming from when finding you. This information is invaluable to your nonprofit – Giving you the ability become more effective with your online efforts. You may not know exactly what to do with this data all the time, but to be without it is to let opportunities slip through your fingers.
Think about how you could use Google Analytics – learn from the content you’re publishing to promote your nonprofit's fundraising event. What content is being viewed for the longest time? What content is producing the desired action of registering, donating or taking action? How can you optimize, modify and adapt?
This is only a glimpse into what you can do with analytics. For real meat check out some of the below posts by Avinash Kaushik – this dude will make you drool over the possibilities!
Remember, “Content is King” so provide an easy way for readers to subscribe to yours. More and more people are reading content, your content, via RSS through tools like Google Reader so make it easy to find on every page of your site.
Tip: Use Google FeedBurner which will allow people to subscribe via RSS or email. You will also get some great statistics which will help you with number one above.
Another Tip: Not sure how to get RSS from the Blackbaud Sphere CMS. Check out How to Use RSS in Sphere.
Use a social bookmarking plug-in like Add This so people who like your work can easily share with their network. Make sure to put this in an easily seen and easily accessed area of every piece of content. You don’t want to make it hard for your readers to share, do you? As with number one and two above you get additional statistics from Add This which further helps you to evaluate the impact of your web site and how you can continue improving.
"AddThis buttons can be found on hundreds of thousands of websites, and are currently viewed over 20 billion times a month by users all over the world, in over 20 languages."
New services such as bit.ly, tinyurl and budurl are emerging. They allow you to take any URL and shrink it! For example you can take the link to this page which is normally pretty long and shrink it to this http://bit.ly/4webways. A couple great things you will love:
It’s easier for you to pass out in your newsletters, mailings and other printed publications
It’s easier for your readers to share
You get more statistics for analysis! (See #1 above).
"We don't want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it's brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web. Bit.ly shortens links so they are easier to share, like TinyURL. The service creates a redirect from a short Bit.ly link out to a longer link on any web page. Allong the way the service analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it."
These are 5 things that you can implement pretty simply. Don’t put them off. Have questions? Please ask below and I’ll do my best to help out.
What am I missing? I know you have some great tips to share with the community here so please take a minute and help us out.
This article was originally posted on NetWits Think Tank at http://bit.ly/HkGc2 by Frank Barry:
Frank is a Consulting Manager at Blackbaud Internet Solutions. At work he helps nonprofits with technology, social media & online strategy. He also spends some time speaking at industry conferences. The rest of the time he enjoys family, learning, sports, food, friends & movies.
If anything, that's the most important thing about social media metrics or for any metrics. Metrics in context connected to action - whether to improve a program already underway or evaluate impact. It's what Avinash Kaushik defines as "Web Analytics 2.0" (I think he even trademarked the term)
Last week, I did a Webinar with Laura Quinn as a primer for nonprofits on Web Analytics. It was interesting to see how people were much more interested in how the metrics were computed on various software programs versus connecting the metric action.
I'm more interested right now in applying the metrics to program improvement. Now, there's a lot more data collect from other sources, but for now I'm just thinking outloud and riffing my last week's post.
Step: Identify the goal or improvement
I want to grow my reader community by providing a great content and conversation about how nonprofits are using social media to reach new audiences, to do their work, or personal learning. I want to engage in conversation with social media evangelists from outside the nonprofit field, nonprofits who are experimenting,etc. How can I keep growing the reader community and the conversation? What should be included here is the social media map or the blogging strategy map that Chris Brogan outlined in his post. Do you have one? Like to share? What would this look like? I'm working on one.
Step 2: Identify the single most important metric
So, what about "How many people read my blog?" and "What is the general trend? Up or Down?" Avinash Kaushik's recommendation:
"Compute Unique Blog
Readers by yourself by combining two metrics that are measured
slightly, only slightly, differently. Unique Visitors, from your web
analytics tool, and Feed Subscribers, from your RSS tool.
Unique Blog Readers = Unique Visitors (to the blog) + Average Feed Subscribers (consuming your feeds)
Step 3: Explore It
I only have four months of accurate RSS subscriber data because I discovered a problem with my RSS feed(s) and feedburner. I corrected the problem with the help of one of my readers, Chris Blow. My RSS subscribers have been increasing more or less by 100 per month, (Thank you everyone!) My blog visitors per month hover at the 11,000-12,000. Should I care about that one is increasing and the other hovers?
I have to ponder why and if I care? Here's where you plunge into Google Analytics and run reports and relate them to your social media map (if you have one ..)
I took at look at new versus returning visitors report in Google Analytics. Keep in mind that these stats do no necessarily include those roughly 1700 people who subscribe to my blog's RSS feed and via email who may read me in their reader and not click through. A high number of new visitors suggests that blog outreach or at least generating traffic has been working.
My blog covers nonprofits and social media which is a broader topic compared to other blogs that narrowly focus. I asked a BlogHer personal branding session whether it was important to narrowly focus your topic to build audience. I learned that blog posts that drive a lot of traffic tend to be those that
sit on the intersection between two topics. In other words, pick your
niche and blog in the center. Because I blog on many different types of technology and how it relates to nonprofit usage, some readers read my blog or particular posts because they are interested in the tools. I can find this out by looking at the posts that get the most visits.
I don't purchase or received a donated GoogleAdWords for my blog which could up the visitor numbers even more if I targeted the right keywords and people who discovered found what they needed. My biggest source of traffic from search engines are people who search on the word "beth" -- Beth's Blog shows up number two, right above the wikipedia entry for beth. This tells me the importance of naming your blog with something in your topic ... and it may explain why those particular visitors have such as high bounce rate or time on site, although computing bounce rate on blogs can be a problem as Avinash Kaushik cautions.
Step 4: Ask What If I Did ....
There a lot of complexity to chew on. But some some easy changes I can make are how I encourage people to subscribe - the messaging and the place of the RSS/email link.
While I was looking at the blog as others see it in the browser, I decided to move up the RSS subscribe feed and the subscribe email feed closer to the top and remove some of the clutter in the link list. This month the RSS subscribe feed was the 32nd most popular link.
I've decided to steal one of Chris Brogan's ideas and add this phrase to posts "And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free."
I've changed the title of my blog from simply "Beth's Blog" which isn't descriptive of the content to Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media. I did that on the fly. I should craft a better title. But the point is that maybe people are not interested in social media and nonprofits will not click over when they search on the term Beth. Even better, my search results may be higher for nonprofits and social media.
Other suggestions for tweaks and changes?
Step 5: Measure
Now I have to measure and compare. What time period?
Definition: Bounce Rate
is the brilliantly dumb
metric It defines customer experience: I came, I puked, I left
Answers: Where are you acquiring crappy traffic from?
Average bounce rate for web sites – according to Kaushik is 40-60%
Bounce rate is a great qualifying metric – good to cross-tab
with other reports
Measure bounce rate for your entire site, core acquisition strategies, bounce rate for your entry pages, bounce rate for your ad words landing pages.
Bounce rate won’t give you all the answers, but will quickly help you to boil down where things aren’t going right.
Referrals
Where is all my traffic coming from?
L
Look at it by bounce rate
Entry/Exit Pages
Important to look at entry pages by bounce rate too
Ask, are these pages are doing a good enough job as your home page where you are investing a lot of time and love? These are where people
Laura Quinn at Idealware has been offering Webinars and I will be joining her "Introduction to Website Analytics" on Thursday, September 27th 1:00 - 2:30 EST. You can register here.
NEW SEMINAR! How many people visit your Web site every day? What
are visitors doing when they get there? Which features are most
popular? We'll talk through the tools and strategies you can use to
get the answers to these questions. Through demos of free tools such
as AWStats and Google Analytics, we'll look at what these tools can
tell you about your site. We'll close with a discussion at some of the
more advanced packages - such as ClickTracks, WebTrends, HBX Analytics,
and Omniture - that might be useful to larger organizations..
Over the past six months, I've been doing some writing on metrics/analytics in general and Google Analytics in particular. Laura asked me to join her to demo Google Analytics and answers questions and it is great to collaborate with colleagues, you always learn something. . We're using the Idealware stats to explore Google Analytics and to look at some of the basic reports and explain metrics. We'll also use the Idealware stats to demo a methodology that connects metrics to business questions. Which is real life is always much harder and complex than in a training context.
I'm also prepping for a panel session I'll be doing at the Museum Computer Network Conference later this fall on Web Analytics. My role on the panel is to look specifically at Social Media Metrics. Just so happens,Chris Brogan wrote an excellent post on Social Media Metrics the other day. Chris's key point is: A few good metrics in the context of
social media goals and strategy are valuable to determine the ROI and
continuous improvement of your social media plan.
Numbers Alone Are Meaningless
Chris's post also reinforces to me the symbiotic relationship between strategy and metrics. And the fact that Metrics alone are meaningless. Chris talks about the importance of mapping your social media strategy and identifying a key metric or two for each strategy that tells you whether you've been successful. He gives a great list of what goes into the map
List of the most likely places a human will encounter the media I produce.
Methods for listening to conversations off-blog and outside my media.
Touchpoints along the value chain and how my media reaches each one.
Path back to a central data capture for reporting and strategy monitoring.
Pinpoints to corrective measures taken from initial strategy path to current efforts.
I'd like to see a social media plan template and have a category that says "key metric" and the report.
ROI and Continuous Improvement both Lead To Actions
The most important thing that comes from your analysis - both the map of your strategy and tracking a key metric or two is ACTION. There are differences between “measures of success”
and “ROI” and exactly how you consider the metrics in either case.
Measures of success - are your goals, plus the “evidence” you gather to
determine if you’ve been successful. Those numbers do not exist alone,
but paint a broader context for improving what you’re doing while it is
underway. Some people call this continuous improvement. The ROI on the other hand is about revenue - did your effort yield results? Was it worth it? Of course, with nonprofits and perhaps businesses, there are intangibles that are not easily tracked.
Measuring Your Blog's Results (Revisiting)
Almost six months ago, I did an analysis of my blog using some metrics suggested by Avinash Kaushik. In response, Stephen Downes said
that numbers alone are meaningless and it is impossible success. Now, I'm thinking of Chris Brogan's question: "Is there a value in better understanding the different touch points
of your strategy, and/or in understanding which numbers matter in what
way for your efforts?"
Although I don't have a formal map for this blog in good enough shape to share, but the one metric that is very important to me is unique subscribers. Those are the people , who presumably, read what I write regularly. As long as that number is growing, I can get some indication of the topics I'm writing about are of interest and that the time I spend responding to comments and leaving comments elsewhere helps build the regular readership community. I'm also stealing a line from Chris Brogan that I will add to the end of my posts ...
I get spikes here and there when well-known bloggers link to me in a post or interview or a link is in a news article, but the effect is temporary. Chris Brogan has also written about the Digg effect. I guess I have to agree with his points:
My experience tells me this about me and my content: you’re already
here. I’m gaining 50-100 new friends a week. And that’s just plenty
fine. It means we get to know about each other in a more organic way.
And it also tells me that “fake” fast growth doesn’t do much to change
my core community.
I feel good about this. It means that tricks don’t matter. Good content matters.
We are at the heart of a social media and social networking
revolution. And this might not be a money revolution, but it is most
certainly a communications revolution. We’re now able to reach out to
people, communicate in a rich fashion, and build stronger relationships
using these tools. As such, I’ve found that my conversations here, with
you, are pertinent to the revolution. We’re all figuring this out
together, right?
So, what key metric are your tracking for your blog or social media strategy? How does it inform your strategy, improve your content/program, or get results? Anyone have a great template for mapping your strategy or plan?
Jerimiah Owyang points to a social media measurement tool called Blogscope. In the post, he includes a paragraph about why social media measurement is important (for businesses)
Why is social media measurement important? With the brands being so decentralized, marketers now know that marketing has shifted off two domains
–the scope is the whole web. Individuals are influenced by word of
mouth and discussions, so social media measurement is tied to the holy
grail of marketing –ROI.
Following the link to this post "The need to centralize brand in a decentralized world" made me link of a recent post from Amy Gahran about Jack Vinson (both of whom I hung out with at BlogHer). And, of course, as I read down the comments I see one from Amy!
Jeremiah emphasizes the need for Digital Lifestule Aggregation (I'm thinking of that People Aggregator T-Shirt Lisa Canter gave me at BlogHer 2006)
The desire to track and centralize data and media created on the disparte web is growing for both individual users and corporate brands. The need for Digital Lifestyle Aggregation rapidly approaches
Jeremiah projects the future:
First of all, please don’t think you can control your brand, it’s not
about that. But you’ll start to need these tools to, track, and
centralize one’s brand (and everything associated around it) in a
decentralized world. I’ve predicted that the future websites will be
community based websites, so aggregating that content in one area helps
to make you the first stop for product knowledge.
I nudged Dave to post his slide deck to SlideShare. He has also posted some recent thoughts on this here. On the surface, it doesn't really relate to nonprofits, but there's lots to translate. Now, I'm going to officially nudge Dave to use the SlideShare Slidecaste new feature that allows you add audio to your slides. I would love to hear Dave narrate his slides.
If you type in the word "Beth," my blog comes up as the first organic search engine results (unpaid search results). Of course, I suspect that I'm not the "beth" most people are searching for because the people that visit my blog after typing the word "beth" into a search leave after ten seconds on average. (Based on an analysis of 6 months of google analytics data)
So, I have some questions ..
If you were going to use a GoogleAdWords Campaign, how would you leverage this situation? How might I use this information?
I'm thinking it might be a way to make some point about social media metrics for a presentation I'm working on, but I'm brain dead and my wrists hurt ... any ideas?
I'm tracking social media metrics for a variety reasons. Surprisingly, what I'm reading is coming to me via social sharing. What you're seeing above is a visualization of sharing intensity - this was the slide I took out of my presentation for the Bridge Conference Presentation earlier this week. Sharing, Engagement, Interaction, Popularity, etc are some of the emerging terms for metrics for social media that are in process of being defined.
In between plastering a copy of Hugo's photo (Nina Simonds' cat) on Facebook Profile and letting me know that blip.tv has a facebook app, Steve Garfield pointed me to this TubeMogul post about the lack of standards in video viewing metrics on the web. (He knew that I am obsessing about video metrics as part of all this exploration.)
How an online video site records a view for their online videos
varies greatly from site to site. We conducted research to test such
differences across eight of the top video sites (results can be seen in
this report).
While one site may count a view every time the play button is clicked,
another might only count finishes. Further complicating the issue is
how sites calculate views on embedded videos, page refreshes, and views
from the same IP address. Therefore, an advertiser looking to use
viewership data to allocate ad inventory or place viral videos has no
comparative ability at this point in time. This lack of standardization
has stymied business model growth for online video sites, content
producers, and advertisers, and will continue to hamstring the industry
until standards are in place.
This points to why certain metrics just don't make sense for social media (and video too). Last week, I noticed a few posts about "measuring engagement" that caught my eye. These articles, of course, were talking about metrics for virtual worlds.
But yesterday, Marshall Kirkpatrick of Splashnet wrote a post called "Time On Site, Viewer Engagement, and the Future of Splashcast." Along with the sneak peek at the mock up of the forthcoming new look of the Splashcast player, Marshall shared some metrics tidbits.
Nielsen/Net Ratings, a growing web traffic tracking project with a world class reputation, announced this week
that it’s going to abandon the page view as its primary metric and
instead use “time on site.” The move was widely discussed as a key
shift towards recognizing the importance of both improved website
design and rich media like video.
About Engagement
The second news item this week was a new study of the impact of viewer engagement. Analysts at a company called Omnicom Group presented findings that they say indicate that engaged viewers of ad supported media have 8 times
the economic impact of average viewers of that media and ads. The study
argues that viewer engagement has a significantly bigger impact than
total advertising budget in driving brand loyalty and sales.
Chris Pirillo also mentions the change in Nielsen/Net Ratings and highlights this quote from the site:
“’Total Minutes’ is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of
Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of
Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments
that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online
gaming and Internet applications,” said Scott Ross, director, product
marketing for the NetView service.
Jerimiah Owyang, has amended this metric by asserting three specific key indicators:
Interaction = How many messages were in chat room per minute on average.
Velocity = How fast did the embedded player go, did it get embedded on blogs?
Tone = What did people say about the show, in the chat room, in the blogs, or whatever. This can be qualitative.
"Measuring ‘engagement’ is like eating an elephant: it’s a big job and you’re not sure where to start." Steve Bridger
via the Mind Blizzard Blog I learned of a new Dutch NGO island, called "Goede Doelen eiland" (good causes island).
The island is a presentation of the Dutch Red Cross and the Dutch Fund
for Disability Sports. The island is sponsored by Dutch bankers ABN Amro and the Free University of Amsterdam (VUA) and was build by students of the VUA. The
intent of the Red Cross venue is to give visitors a taste of the
atmoshpere in disaster areas, how hard it can be to reach a relieve
post and thus try to raise commitment to the organisations work. The 'fun' part of the island is the Stadium for the Dutch Fund for
Disability Sports. In the stadium it is possible to go for a wheelchair
race. Both organisations are looking for new ways of fundraising and
are looking into the possibilities in Virtual Worlds.
And, so again, I'm thinking about how does one even begin to measure visitor engagement in a space like this? I'm thinking again of Steve Bridger's excellent post on the topic and the model diagram he has showing the degrees of engagement in social media. Rik Riel is has also written about this and has described it as "avatar engagement."
Everywhere I go in virtual world circles, I seem to encounter folks wrestling with the question: how do you measure avatar engagement? (Check the new Meta Metaverse blog and the eSheep blog
for interesting commentary on this.) For companies looking to use
virtual worlds for marketing, avatar engagement is the Holy Grail.
Non-profits are also struggling with how to track if avatars coming to
their virtual headquarters are getting the message and incorporating it
into their real lives. Researchers are keen to develop measurements to
unpack quantitatively how avatars experience different virtual
environments and consume media they are presented with.
Rick goes on to layout a series of questions that one would want answered to determine engagement. I think it would require a mix of qualitative and quantitative data.
People who know me know that I am research and information junkie. This includes not only information on the Internet but also books. A big problem in my office is the lack of bookshelf space and my family does not let enter bookstores in their presence.
It may be one reason why I love the documentary approach to screencasting - an excuse to add to my book collection. In the screencast wiki, I have a list of books and articles I used for the research as well as links to more comprehensive lists. I could make an entire screencast examining the excellent resources and gurus out there on the topic.
I'd like to introduce my nonprofit readers to one of them:
Technology cannot replace the need for talented professionals.
Web analytics is actually a series of identifiable business processes.
People, technology, and process are all required to create repeatable successes.
All companies can be very successful provided they're committed to understanding the process of "doing" web analytics.
I just added a copy of The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators to my collection (it's an electronic book and comes with an excel spreadsheet of a worksheet). Peterson defines them as "numbers designed to succinctly convey as much information as possible. Good key performance indicators are well defined, well presented, create expectations and drive actions." When I was researching this topic, I wanted to go deeper into this area - but with limited time and wanted a primer - did not. Now .. I'm interested in the best practices around using KPI and Peterson's book is a fantastic resource. I thinking about what is translatable to nonprofits and organizations that have smaller budgets than Fortune 500 Companies.
Well, must get back to researching for the next screencast which is on SalesForce and upcoming July training workshops which are on the topic of Fundraising 2.0.
I'm pleased to announce that I have completed the screencast, sponsored by NTEN, on Google Analytics! I created a companion wiki where you find lots of links to additional resources to help you learn more. This screencast would not have been possible without all the help I got from:
Dave Amos, Web guy at the Idealist (and Ami Dar) and Laura Whitehead, South Hams, CVS, who not only allowed me complete access to their Google Analytics stats, but answered my numerous stupid questions.
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google, really helped me understand the true meaning of Web Analytics 2.0 and has hopefully forgiven me for not saying his last name correctly!
Laura Quinn for serving as my guinea pig for recording and incorporating brief interviews into screen cast (as well as her for terrific introductory article that helped me get started)
Holly Ross for suggesting the topic and understood that it takes more than a week or two to make a screencast!
For all my blog readers and participants on the NTEN Nonprofit Webmasters Affinity group who left comments, made suggestions, pointed me to resources, and shared screen captures of their stats.
Several months ago, I knew zip about web analytics. I was a little scared to make a screencast about something that I knew nothing about. (I blogged about that here)
What I discovered is that creating a screencast is a terrific personal learning environment because you can't create a media piece unless you really know the topic. And yes, learning is time consuming and you can't really master a topic like this in 90 minutes let alone create a media piece. But a screencast forces you to organize your learnings, document them, and share them.
I shared the screencast with Avinash Kaushik and frankly was a little intimidated to do so because well, he is the expert on the topic. Here was the response: "It is wonderful. The thing like I loved about this screencast is that it is real, it is true UCG and has a human touch to it."
I did learn one more thing that is a best practice.
One quick pointer on the date range comparison (around seven min mark). Where possible share the tip with you users that they should line up the week day of each time period if they can. Good best practice. So if your first time period starts at a Monday then just move the bars of the start date in the comparison time period to a Monday s well. This might not make for a complete month but it will ensure that for the sake of seasonality your time line compare the same week days. Else sometimes you’ll see lifts where there aren’t any.
Almost all the photos in the screencast and the music are from sources licensed with Creative Commons licenses. I took great pains to attribute them in this section of the wiki. In addition, I asked for and got permission from two content sources that were "all rights reserved" including this photo by Audrey and Daniel. (Be sure to read about their connection with Cambodia)
I'd also like to thank Jeremiah Owyang who graciously allowed me to use 25 seconds from his video interview with Avinash Kaushik.
The Avinash Kaushik is asking us to send photos of the book and get a free bookmark. My book still hasn't arrived, but managed to sneak a peek in the local bookstore.
As part of some research for a screencast on Google Analytics for NTEN, I gave a shout out to folks asking for examples. (BTW, if you are looking to learn more about how to use Google Analytics, I highly recommend the Webinar that NTEN is offering next Wednesday with Avinash Kaushik.)
Laura Whitehead, Chief Officer at South Hams CVS responded with lots to share. Here's how she is using the tool for decision-making. What is amazing is that she has obviously created a data driven culture in her organization. Thank you Laura for sharing your knowledge!
Tell me about your role at the charity
I'm Laura Whitehead, Chief Officer at South Hams CVS (www.southhamscvs.org.uk) which is a charity in South Devon, UK which exists to support local voluntary and community organizations in our locality with a wide range of services and support to help them grow and flourish. We've always prided ourselves in our information services, as we are regularly in contact with over 550 local groups. Many of these groups are small and rurally isolated, so ensuring that we can deliver relevant and timely information to these organizations is key to their wellbeing. One area which we (okay well me especially!) is our website. It's nothing over special, it's branding and image and layout is all in line with our other materials that we produce, but as well as the making and updating of our website we are also keen to keep an eye on how it is being used.
What is your background and experience with Google Analytics?
I am also a website designer and circuit rider, with a keen passion for accessiblity and usability especially in the arena of non-profits being enabled to achieve their aims using technology. So therefore, I am probably a bit unusual, and my staff team do cope well with having a boss that is overtly keen to ensure we are getting it right! This is where Google Analytics helps to play that
part! Also, if like me you are involved in looking after many websites, this is where the Goggle Analytics comes in to its own. Not only does it let you analyse more than one site, it also lets you add people to view the details it provides too, which is really useful when working with so many groups, to enable them to take part in what is going on in how their site is working or not as the case may be.
Can you take me through a little tour of how you use Google Analytics?
When you go in to your Google Analytics for your site, you have a summary page
known as the Dashboard – which gives you an instant overview of what's going on, where people are viewing from, and how they are getting to you. Here's what our dashboard looks like:
It has a really useful 'friendly' interface, with menu's as to the types of information that you will want to look for. Instead of the old fashioned 'hit counter' that so many came to love, analytics applications help you to understand that 'quality' is more important than the 'quantity' of the visitors to your site.
You can also find information about where they have come from (maybe not surprising that many of our visitors aren't actually the people we are targeting! But others elsewhere in the country, Europe or even further!), also the browsers they are using, and also if they are still using dial up (are your pages lightweight and fast loading?). By being able to understand your 'customers' of your site it helps you to understand if your site is working as it was intended. On our site we've added general background information for funders and partners, but the most important bits are the resources available for groups and information that they need to help them to decide whether to contact us or not for further advice and support.
If you spend just a little bit of time digging deeper into it all you can start to get a picture of where people are spending their time on your site, and also if they are only spending just a few seconds and then leaving your site (bouncing!). You can also use the analytics to see the depth of their visit. Looking at statistics coming from just your home/index page doesn't really do much for real reporting at how your site is working.
If they've come to your site from a search engine, there's a strong possibility they may not enter on the home page, but another page on your site. So it's useful as a tool to evaluate if they can not only find their way around, but succeed in finding what they want.
Also, what key words do you use for your site? Are they the keywords that real people using search engines found you by? Using analytics helps you to see the searches that people make (south hams tool hire? That was what one person entered. And you can see why, we mention the words 'South Hams' and mention the word 'tools' in our content too meaning tools to equip groups. We also offer equipment for hire to local groups like OHPS and a badgemaker and so on which appears in our content too.)
Are you aware of all the places that link to your site and why? How people have got to you is always useful to know. Plus it helps you to market yourself with related organisations. All the right people who we know about seem to link to us, and we have visitors come through from those links.
The part which we find most useful as an organisation (and not just me being the over-excited techie here, all my team can understand and absorb this!) is the Site Overlay.
It brings up your page and if you look at the image below, you'll see all the links have a little white bar image over them. This shows how many people have clicked into this link from this page. We use this as part of our main tools for monitoring the effectiveness of our site, in conjunction with the bounce rate and exit points of our site.
* Those parts that get used the most – do they need more information adding as site users are obviously searching for more information?
* Why aren't people clicking on the other links? Haven't we made it obvious about what we are talking about? What are we missing here? Is this information actually needed, we thought it was what groups needed, but hey – no-one is using that link ever (well highly unlikely but a scenario to think about!), so maybe we need to re-think the information and knowledge of our organization that we want to deliver out there. (I know so many small organizations who are so excited to have their first ever website and put everything up on their site. Their policies, and lots of other in-formation that isn't possibly really needed or wanted by general viewers!).
The great part of the overlay aspect is you can click on all the links, and keep on going deeper into your site. Then that helps you to map out how people are using the information and where they are going next on your site (keep the bounce and exit thing in the back of your mind here too!).
You can start to establish the needs of your users and what they want from you by the way they are using your site.
We have a range of information sheets available on our site. Each of the links to the downloads all have extra analytics tags attached, so we can easily monitor how many of which one is downloaded. That's useful. As part of our funding we have to monitor how many times we're requested for certain information. If we post an information sheet out, we can obviously count that, also look at our display racks in our office, and count those too, now we can also count how many are downloaded from the website. Useful to moni-tor need, and if we are getting it right. If noone downloaded the sheets, maybe they are not up to date, or there wasn't a need for help in that area from our users, and we could assess whether we need to produce information on different topics for example.
Using analytics helps us to see how people got to where they wanted, how long they spent on pages, and also where they left (Entrance and Exit paths help with finding all that out.) Sounds strange, but this is important – ask your self, did they find what they needed, or did they lose interest?
Finally, your visitors. They are the important part in all of this to help you to find out if they are getting what they expected and need. Just to help with your ego boost of informing you if your organisation is getting it right or needing more work with your site, the visitor loyalty bit is good too. I'm not sure who comes back to ours so often but it is good to know someone is.
There's so much you can do with analytics applications. At first they seem abit daunting, but feel confident and have a play with it. They are really simple to incorporate into your site, and even though we only use a small proportion of the abilities available under Google Analytics, and haven't yet used the 'goals' sections and other parts to push our site further (but alas, we aren't a major co-orporation, nor a national charity, we are a small fo-cussed not for profit organisation trying to help enable local groups and communities so are tying our best to aim and cater for that.)
If you are struggling to master the art of web analytics (like I am right now), you must use the link above and purchase a copy of Avinash Kaushik's "Web Analytics: An Hour of Day."
As many of my subscribers know, I am working on a screencast about Web Analtyics for nonprofits in general and Google Analytics in particular for NTEN.
Since I am neither an analytics geek or techie, I've been researching the topic and collecting examples. Avanish Kaushik's blog has been invaluable. So have all the stories that people who work in nonprofits have shared with me.
Since I don't work for a nonprofit organization, I needed to get my hands dirty with some real life nonprofit web site data. Ami Dar of the idealist.org graciously offered to share their web site data ("we have nothing to hide") and introduced me to the idealist's web guy, Dave Amos. Today, I was able to spend an hour on the phone on a web conference call with Dave Amos and Avinash Kaushik looking at idealist data . I asked dumb questions and got really smart answers.
I learned a huge amount and I've only been able to transcribe the first 30 minutes!
Overview:
As the web person or IT person in your organization, you are most likely responsible for running web analytics. It is important that you are not the only person in the organization looking at the data and applying it. You have to change your organization's culture to a data-driven culture -- one that looks at data to inform decisions. You have shift people from feeling overloaded by analytics data to encouraging them to consume it. You are no longer just the web guy, you are web analytics steward or translator.
Whether or not you like this new role, you also have to become a marketing analyst. That is, the person in the organization who thinks about the needs of the users and understands the purpose of the web site well enough to translate what information management and program staff need to make decisions and dig into Google Analytics to extract it for them and present them with just the pretty report they need.
In the past, the web manager would round up huge amounts of analytics data and "throw it over the fence." That's web analytics 1.0. Web analytics 2.0 requires a different approach - to be a bridge between the sea of data and decision-making.
Data must be connected to the purpose of web site and not viewed in a vacuum.
The very first words that came out of Avanish Kaushik's mouth was a question to Dave Amos "What is the purpose of the idealist.org web site?" It wasn't a PH.D dissertation on what various metrics mean or a whirlwind tour of Google Analytics cool features. This is important because what will make us get excited about analytics is connecting the data to mission.
It is important to build a data driven culture in the organization and get other staff members to appreciate and look at web analytics data. Kaushik notes that many nonprofits and small businesses don't have a culture of looking at web data to inform decisions. As Kaushik says, "It's hard and the data can be overwhelming."
He asked Dave if he was using the default web analytics report on the dashboard to share the reports with staff members. This default report is a six-page pdf document. Kaushik observes that the best strategy for changing the organizational culture around using data is to customize the report for staff. He showed us how this can be done easily in google analytics.
He also recommends that the report should only be one page long. Notes Kaushik, "In my experience, people tend to only read or look at one page before their eyes glaze over. Google Analytics can generate reports at the right level of prettiness so that people will actually take a look at it. So, don't overload them."
Finally, Kaushik recommends using the email report function (which can be scheduled for weekly or monthly or "however much you want to spam them.") The important point for web managers is don't be a gatekeeper for the web data. Don't make other staff members ask you for it. Kaushik shared a step-by-step process for helping to make this culture shift:
A. Identify the key metrics! You need to help staff identify what information they need to inform decisions. You need to go through an upfront inquiry process before you generate a single report. When you talk to staff about web analytics data, refrain from using the word "data" because most people will not have a clear idea what to ask for. It isn't that people are stupid, it is just that they aren't aware of the possibilities that analytics data offers. You, as the IT person or Web Manager, need to show them. It goes beyond knowing which buttons to click.
You need to ask questions like ....
How do you spend money or your time to drive people to our web site? How are you spending time or money in improving the content, design, or navigation of the web site? How are you making decisions?
These questions always lead to data or suggest a report.
B. Context is everything! The reports should not show data for a single time period, but show a comparison between two time periods. (This week and last week for example). That is actionable information! The schedule reports function has a "check box" for "send data comparison" if that is checked, and it will automatically send a comparison report comparing the weekly data with last week's data. Notes Kaushik, "This is really important for people who don't understand data. The reports show "red" and "green" (red decrease, green increase) and everyone immediately understands what is good news and what isn't."
C. Don't give them all report views, only the most important. The new Google Analytics interface allows you to easily drill down and explore your web site data. Don't just hand people the top view. Begin with generating a report that answers the common questions from staff. Next create a customized report for them by drilling down into the most important view. You can add that report to the dashboard so it is automated. Kaushik recommends that you zero in on the clearest visual or stat that answers the question. Suggests Kaushik, "Edit out all the extra junk in the default report that people don't care about.Once you overload them more information, they stop paying attention."
D. Use the schedule feature. Once you have a good understanding of the information that people really want, create that specific report for them and schedule the report to be sent weekly or monthly. Don't be a gate keeper.
E. Give them more detail or additional reports when they ask for it! Kaushik suggests that over time people will begin to ask more questions about the data or request additional reports. You are teaching them to interpret and apply analytics data one step at a time.
Kaushik says that by following the steps above, the culture shift starts to happen. In some organizations it happens faster and in other organizations it happens slower.
Kaushik's Favorite Metric (for Web Sites)
Bounce Rate
"It's a sexy metric!"
It is leading indicator of the quality of content on your web site and whether or not you are attracting the right traffic to your site. Bounce rate measures people who come to your web site and leave instantly. There are different definitions of "instantly" based what tool you are using. Google Analytics defines it as "anyone who has come to your web site and seen one page and left." Bounce rate is the best indicator of whether or not you are getting the right people to visit your site.
The bounce rate are the people who are coming to your web site, giving you one glance, and they leave. Why? The page they landed on sucked! The page didn't connect to them. Maybe the wrong keywords? This is a great way to know that you're getting the right kind of traffic. If you're getting a high bounce rate, take a look at the page or the keywords you're using or whatever, and ask why. Keep drilling down.
Be careful using it on blogs. The reason is that with blogs people can visit the top page of your blogs and read everything about you - the last five posts, your about page, and more. So you might come to my blog, spend a lot of time on my blog reading everything and then leave. But, you would be counted as part of the bounce rate (on Google Analytics) because you only visited one page.
What is the best metric for blogs?
Well, it isn't time on site, either. That's because of the way that analytics programs compute time on page. Watch the number of unique visitors over time and the percent of new visitors to my blog. I watch for every day and week, percent of new referring urls. I want to see if my blog is being linked from different places.
If I were to pick one metric, I would recommend to measure the number of RSS subscribers. I'm trying to build an audience that will consume my content. The RSS subscriber is a vote of confidence that I am writing the type of content for which they are going to extra pain to sign up. Not the absolute number, but the growth. RSS subscription is hurdle is a barrier to cross.
I'll spending quite a bit more than an hour an day on topic in the coming weeks. So stay tuned.
Stephen Downes summarized my post on Social Media Metrics and Measuring Blog Outcomes and added some commentary. I agree with some of his points and disagree with others.
My post wasa riff on evaluating the effectiveness of blogs, and in particular, a set of metrics from Avinash Kaushik:
"Raw Author Contribution (posts and words in post)
Unique Blog Readers (content consumption - Unique Visitors and Feed Subscribers)
Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
Technorati "Authority" (measuring your impact on the world!)
Cost (what!)
Return on Investment (what's in it for you/your business)"
Stephen offers a snarky comment that I actually agree with:
Would this newsletter be twice as good if I wrote twice as many posts
or wroite them twice as long? If I wrote about a more popular topic -
educational policy, say - I would have more readers. Would that be
better? Is Will Richardson better than me because he gets more
comments? Am I better than you because I have a higher Technorati rank?
Would it be better if I made money and spent less on my website?
I agree with you that it is meaningless to use the numbers to get into
"mine is bigger than yours" comparisons to measure quality or
popularity. Some pr professionals agree.
Stephen goes on to say:
Measuring "your blog's outcome" is ridiculous. It's like measuring 'friendship'. measuring 'reflective moments'. As Beth Kanter says,
"numbers and data alone are almost meaningless." I don't think they get
a lot more meaningful even if you add them to qualitative data.
Yes, you can't measure friendship or reflective moments, just like in the nonprofit sector we can't measure world peace.
With all due respect, I think you really missed the point about the usefulness of combining numbers with qualitative reflection on how to improve your blog. Whether you want to make money or educate people or just deepened your own learning -- setting some realistic benchmarks or goals, figuring out a way to determine if you reached them, and reflecting on why or why not - can lead to continuous improvements in the quality of your blog writing.
AND, if that leads to more readers, higher ranking, more subscribers, more comments - that's the icing on the cake!
Kathy Paine left an interesting comment on Kaushik's blog "you’re trying to engage employees or customers in a conversation, and improve your relationships, these metrics fall short." I hope she will unpack that a bit more.
My post yesterday on measuring your blog's success had generated some reaction, from the comments to Tony Karrer to Beth Kanter,
who says I "missed the point' - "Whether you want to make money or educate people or just deepened your own learning -- setting some realistic benchmarks or goals, figuring out a way to determine if you reached them, and reflecting on why or why not - can lead to continuous improvements in the quality of your blog writing." One of my posts from earlier today constitutes part of a response - but also I want to point to Karrer's reasons for blogging - personal learning and network
building. My point is that there is no quantitative indicator of successful personal learning or of a valuable network contact, and that any attempt at such will misrepresent what it is we actually value in learning or network contacts.
I put a query out on NTEN Affinity Group of Nonprofit Webmasters. I asked them if they would be willing to share any screen captures from some key reports (as suggested by Google Analytics Evangelist Kaushik) and what they learned:
Key Report #1: Referring Search Terms From Search Engines The report that tells you which search phrases people are using to find your site tells you a lot about your users.
Key Report #2: Referring URLs Look at the report that tells you which Web sites are sending you traffic. Does this correspond to your expectations?
Key Report #3: Content Popularity It's essential to view the list of Top 10 (or 15) most popular pages on your site. "Knowing what content is being consumed can lead you to so many insights," Kaushik says. "What are people coming to my Web site for? Are the things that I want to promote actually the things that people are looking at?"
Key Report #4: Percent of Visitors Who Visit the Home Page This metric often shocks site owners. "They think that everyone sees the homepage, so they put their maximum energies and promotion there." But since search engines display a site's internal pages, most users enter a site far from the home page.
Key Report #5: Site Overlay Wouldn't you love it if you could open your site and see exactly where people are clicking? With the Site Overlay report you can. It displays your actual pages — just as they look to users — with a click level indicator next to each link. It shows the number of people who click on each link.
Key Report #6: Site Bounce Rate The Bounce Rate report reveals the number of visitors who stayed just a few seconds. These are the people who came to your site but didn't engage. In short, your bounce rate is your failure rate.
I got one response from Larry Velez who works with a company named Sinu While he isn't using Google Analytics, he shared an analytics screen capture and a story about traffic referrals. We had quick email back and forth and he gave me permission to blog or rather their marketing director David Owen did and called Larry a genuis. (I agree)
Larry told me about the what they learned from the results:
- Our blog brought in traffic, we thought it was just fun to
do - Search queries we never thought of were leading to
us - Our traffic is pretty constant regardless of marketing
efforts (seems like it takes a lot to make the needle move) - Our existing customers are the biggest visitors to our
site - Proper HTML coding makes a huge difference in Google rankings
Larry notes, "As to how looking at the numbers and thinking about it has affected our online marketing decisions – it has
actually made us question the value of many traditional marketing
efforts. The only things that seem to move the needle on our traffic
are our real-world relationships. But we don’t sell hardware or
software and are more a long term relationship company. So maybe all
the ad-buy, affiliate program, SEO stuff may not apply to us."
I asked about what he discovered in looking at the search query
referrals (what people type into search engine that gets them to click to the site). He mentioned that it has given them some ideas for blog
content and refined their marketing messaging about their services. I asked him for three examples:
NYC cab cost per minute - This led to a blog entry about a conversation here in the office where people here were trying to figure out if there was an optimal speed to be going in a NYC cab based on their rate sheet.
Greenhill SAVP - This led to a blog post where we had written about a local VC pitch contest we won
What does the IT department do? - We just laughed at this one. No one understands the role of IT departments and we are making it simple to understand by aligning incentive structures with the organization.
Larry comments sent me into my blog's search keyword referrals report and also found a connection to Taxi Cabs ... you won't get it unless you were a music conservatory student like me ..
That's an old joke about the guy who asked a NYC taxi driver that question, and cabby replied, "Practice, Practice, Practice." That search term lead to this post "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The post was about Powerpoint Presentation delivery techniques. The bounce rate (or failure rate) for this search term is pretty high. So, it is telling me that I need to think more carefully about what words go into the titles of my blog post and those should be more closely related to my content focus and the type of people I want to attract.
I'd love to know about your search engine keyword referral stories! Tell me a keyword search referral that you found in your analytics and how you improved your marketing, web site, or blog as a result?
I've been trying to collect screen captures and stories about nonprofit web analytics for a screencast on Google Analytics for NTEN. Kevin Gamble left me a comment on a google analytics post that the "Depth of Visit Report" was one of the best metrics (coupled with referring source) for understanding visitor behavior on his university's web site. He notes:
"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."
I asked him if would share a screen shot of the report and reflect a little further on his comment. He did and gave me permission to blog! (Thanks for the transparency). He notes:
"The bottom line on statistics -- we're seeing pretty routinely that
around 80% of the hits are coming from search. The second graphic on depth of
visit says we're seeing 90% look at less than two pages and exit. It's around
82% looking at one page and exiting. These numbers have been pretty consistent
for several months.
We're trying to make some changes in our web site based on user behavior. Search drives visitor behavior. Our mantra has been (and will continue to be) that each page of content
needs to standalone. We also keep hammering that content needs to be content -
not solely navigation -- just related links that are directly related to the content.
He went on to say something that made me pause for a minute:
The user behavior on my blog is quite different. Only 40% of the direct
hits come through search. Most come through referrer links. Even more don't come at all -- they come from feed readers (as you would know). But the stats
are very different. I still don't think navigation matters much though.
"There's some uncertainty about how non-profits should approach social
networks, and especially how to get an effective return for the time
that has to be invested in these relationship-spaces."
And I'd add blogs, twitter, flickr, tagging, and all the other social media tools and strategies to the list too ...
Measuring outcomes for social media tools and strategy is as Avinash Kaushik notes in his recent post on the topic, "an evolving art (not
quite a science yet) and you have to be up to the challenge of both
thinking a bit differently and be ok with leveraging several different
tools." I might also add that figuring out what are realistic short-term outcomes is just as hard if not harder.
Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)
Cost (what!)
Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)
He goes on to analyze his blog's success on its one year birthday. I'm struggling to learn Google Analytics, so I thought it might be a useful exercise to go through his framework with my own blog.
1. Raw Author Contribution (posts and words in post)
My blogging platform, Typepad, does not have a way to easily and automatically measure the number of posts and words in post in a given time period. I did some research and couldn't find anything, although I did find an excellent blog on blog optimization. Maybe one of my readers will point me to some third-party typepad plugin that does this? Word Press users can use General Stats plugin.
Hmm .. something to consider when choosing your blogging platform.
I can't easily measure this metric unless I set up some sort of Ruby Goldberg contraption like cut and pasting a month's worth of posts and cut paste into word, count the number of posts, and then chart in excel. Yuck.
Some people have used the word "prolific" to describe my raw author contribution. And, if I scan back over the past year, I typically write between 30-60 posts per month, including at least 4-6 longer posts per month. My goal in "raw author contribution" was to write at least one blog post every day. I did compute one month's worth of posts and words in post. For April, I had 52 posts and 29,332 words.
Kaushik acknowledges that this metric only measures quantity, not quality. He does suggest that comments per post is also another metric of quality. I agree, but is a ratio the best number?
I find it very hard to measure quality with numbers ... like anyone who has a background in the arts full well knows. I remember serving as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and had to quantify artistic merit ... which is very hard to so. I think that writing a blog is an art more than a science and there is something unappealing to me about looking at numbers of posts and numbers of words to evaluate the quality of my blog posts and ultimate success of my blog. Why am I resisting this?
I learn so much from Kaushik, but I'm seem drawn more to qualitative measures and the integration of numbers too.
2. Unique Readers
This is defined "How many people read your blog?" That's a hard question for me to answer because as Kaushik notes and all of us bloggers know all too well -- analytics programs do not track RSS feeds. His recommendation:
"Compute Unique Blog
Readers by yourself by combining two metrics that are measured
slightly, only slightly, differently. Unique Visitors, from your web
analytics tool, and Feed Subscribers, from your RSS tool.
Unique Blog Readers = Unique Visitors (to the blog) + Average Feed Subscribers (consuming your feeds)
So, here's mine - sort of. The visits and unique visitor counts come from Google Analytics (for some reason I've lost about several months of stats ...so I can't go back further than the last four months....) A year ago, I had 1,000 monthly visitors -- so it is nice to see the growth.
UPDATE: Chris Blow in the comments suggested that I had to
point them over to feed burner and says it is tricky. I need to know
how! Anyone know?
Counting and seeing trends in my RSS subscribers/readers was a pain because I have several feeds and only one of them is in feed burner. The only way to track the real numbers of subscribers or at least people who read via bloglines is from looking at the subscriber stats in bloglines. I have 256 in feedburner and another 249 who read one of my 3 feeds via bloglines. That makes 495. Not sure if there is duplication and there isn't anyway for me to see trends over time.
And, that's the important point. My readership has continued to grow over time. I need to set some goals for the next six months and a strategy .... What is a reasonable growth rate? What is a reasonable goal?
With all that aside, I'm pleased with these stats! Thank you readers!
3. Conversation Rates
The conversation rate is the average number of comments per post. I had to compute mine manually by counting them in typepad. A time consuming pain .... particularly because I'm 100% in love with this metric to measure conversation. Since Jan 1, I had 247 posts divided by 387 comments which is 1.5. (I did not include spam comments or my own)
Kaushik recommends:
For your blog set a goal for this most social of social mediums. It is
also a great reflection of your content creating a level of engagement
with your target audience. As with other metrics watch the trend.
When I first started blogging, I hardly received any comments at all. So, I set a modest goal of 1 comment per post. I'm there I guess.
I am thinking that looking over the comments of posts that attracted more comments than others and reflecting on why that occurred would be extremely valuable. (Geez, that a whole other post, huh?) So, if I want to increase my conversation rate, I'll have to look at those posts with the lens of Kaushik's advice above and go back and re-read every single word Amy Gahran has written on the topic. So, should I consider this a success? Well, that award goes to you dear readers who are willing to contribute your thoughts and provide insights.
Again, measuring the conversation rate is not easy in typepad. I have to do it manually.
4. Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)
Kaushik admits to mixed feelings about Technorati and I know Amy Gahran has tracked and written about the drawbacks to Technorati. Nonetheless, Kaushik says he is a fan:
If you just stick to your blogging and write great content then
there is no better authority, at the moment, that will provide you a
metric to compare your impact on the blogging universe. It is a simple metric, there are 70 million blogs and if they were
ranked from one to seventy million then what would your rank be.
Again, I have not consistently written down and charted my technorati rating, but I do know that trend has been to go up.
Kaushik's advice is:
For your blog, personal or professional I recommend a goal setting exercise. Do a quick Technorati search for all the blogs in your own ecosystem. Create a goal to beat the highest listed blog in that ecosystem in x months, where x is aggressive. :)
That goal setting exercise seems right for businesses, but nonprofits? I try to link to and encourage as many nonprofit bloggers as possible and help them increase their technorati rating. Why would I want to make it into a football match?
Setting the goal is step 1, but of course a strategy is needed. What is most important for me is to track and reflect on what makes that technorati rating rise. I've been doing this informally, what I've learned I'll put into a separate post.
5. Cost
Kaushik suggests:
What is the cost to your life, business, time of your blog? Compute it and you’ll be surprised.
I was surprised to read that he invests 25 hours a week on his direct blogging process (answering email, writing, researching, maintenance.) I haven't tracked my time on "direct blogging process" and it is also hard to separate from other work because the two are so intertwined. Take for example, I writing this post because I'm trying to teach myself Google Analytics so I can make a screencast for NTEN and I can only learn by first-hand experience -- and to learn I'd be writing about it anyway - but with the blog - other people get to read it.
And, I blog on multiple sites, but I cross post here.
Oh, this is sort of hard to precisely measure.
Kaushik adds that he blogs for the love it:
Interestingly this is a addiction and I don’t think that the investment
is going to go down. But at least I know, and so should you.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying I'm addicted ... okay, okay, yes I am. However, I have found the daily discipline of writing extremely important to my professional learning. So important that I get crabby when I don't blog. The key for me that the topic I'm blogging about is close to my work and my passion.
I probably spend at least 10-15 hours per week on direct blogging work for this blog. And given the tracking tasks outlined, that will probably go up. I'm going to have track down that salary study NTEN did a while back and compute the value based on that.
6. ROI
Kaushik does not provide an ROI, but mentions the "happiness" factor related to blogging.
All because it makes you happy. And there is no price that you can put
on a ROI of happiness. If you are one of those (and I am!) then for a
moment leave that aside
I have to agree. He does say that we need to look at ROI:
You (and I) should track ROI. Use what you have: job offers you get,
proposals for marriage, increase in salary at work, sales driven to
your ecommerce website from the blog, reduction in the cost of PR
because now your blog is so omnipresent and a big bull horn (for
businesses this is big), number of paid conference speaking
engagements, and so on and so forth
I have to admit that number is hilarious! If I made that much money, I'd stop working and give my time to worthy causes (and my family.)
The ROI is hard to compute because there are so many intangibles. Like the fact that blogging forces me to do a certain level of reflection everyday and that makes me think more deeply about my topics. And, then readers comment and help me get smarter which in turn deepens my expertise.
And, what about the readers who learn from my learnings? That's really intangible and hard to measure. For example, I got this comment in my LinkedIn the other day:
Your blog and portfolio items have made a tremendous difference in my work. Since discovering your blog in late March, I have:
-Uploaded 300+ (mostly) annotated images of Minnesota forests, several of which are linked from my (6 week old) website, www.myminnesotawoods.org -Given blogging more serious consideration, and feel much more aware of what I'd be getting into -Begun to be more intentional about reading and commenting on blogs, per your advice -Set up a pageflakes feed reader, which I now consult regularly -Set up a wikispaces page for collaborative concept development (actually, to allow a group to develop the forestry blog idea for/with me)
It's been a busy spring! You've really been a huge help. Thank you for taking the time to help us newbies along. I especially appreciate both the quality and the personal nature of your posts and learning tools."
Conclusion
The numbers and data alone are almost meaningless unless you take those numbers think about how to make improvements, set goals, and reflect. The reflection involves qualitative data -- anecdotes, reflections, stories, and pattern analysis.
I also realize that I need to be more consistent in collecting and analyzing the data and collecting data about my blog (or other social media) there may not be fully automated tools that make it efficient unless I consider switching platforms or tools. I need to look at the pros/cons of other platforms. I also need to clean up my RSS mess and perhaps contemplate.
So, dear readers, have you set goals for your blog (or web site?) What metrics or qualitative data do you use to measure them? How do you reflect on them?
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
