Alissa Ruehl

Understanding Your Audience

The start of a new year is the perfect time to focus on a user-centered strategy for your website. How well do you currently understand your users? Google Analytics can show you a lot you might not have realized about your visitors.

Use these five audience insights available through Google Analytics as you develop and adjust your web strategy. 

Who are they?

Google Analytics won’t tell you the names and email addresses of site visitors, but it will tell you about their technological profile.

What to do with this information: Create technical requirements for your site based on screen resolution, browser versions, connection speed and mobile devices so that your site displays well for the majority of your users. Revise yearly. (This should be in addition to accessibility requirements.)

Where are they?

Another important thing you can learn about your visitors is their physical location. Regional organizations may be surprised to see traffic from another part of the country and national or international organizations may find areas with fairly few visitors.

What to do with this information: Know the geographic concentration of your visitors. If this is surprising, consider adjusting your marketing and events strategy accordingly. Look at this at least quarterly.

Why did they come to your site?

Google Analytics can show you what search terms people used to get to your site, and what links they followed in your emails or on other sites (if you have set up tracking properly).

If you set up site search tracking in your Google Analytics instance, you can see what people searched for once they arrived. This can help you decide what to focus on in your homepage.

What to do with this information: Investigate what people are looking for when they come to your site. Design your homepage to focus at least 50% on what your visitors are already looking for (with the other 50% showing them new things they might not yet be aware of).

Where do they go on your site?

Google Analytics can also show you which pages are popular. This shows both what people are interested and what the architecture of your site leads them to. If two pages are equally promoted on the homepage or in emails but one receives significantly more traffic than the other, you can tell something about your audience’s interests.

What to do with this information: Find links or topics that are prominent on your homepage but do not get traffic and remove them from your homepage to make room for the items that people are looking for.

How frequently do people come to your site?

Do your visitors stop by weekly to read updates, or do they come by once a year to sign up for an event or donate? Google Analytics can tell you how many people come at which frequency.

What to do with this information: If visitors come infrequently, ask yourself if that makes sense for your organization. Sometimes it is fine to have constituents who visit infrequently but donate or participate in events. If you think people would be interested in frequent engagement, brainstorm ways to create unique content on a regular basis and use social media to engage people daily or weekly.

It’s important to keep focused on details that involve your audience and in turn give your constituents the best service in all areas, including online. Harnessing the power of Google Analytics to be a more data driven organization will benefit you, your constituents and your community.

This article originally appeared in the Georgia Center for Nonprofits' March 2012 newsletter. For more information, check out the first in my blog series on Google Analytics.

Google Analytics - Annotations

This post is the sixth in an ongoing series about Google Analytics. As we proceed, I’ll share tips on how you can use this tool to gain more insight into your online marketing.

If you’re not yet familiar with Google Analytics, it’s a free tool from Google that you can add to your site to give you information about how people are coming to your website and how they behave when they get there. Read the first post for an overview of the Dashboard or go to my profile to see all of my posts on Google Analytics 

If you’ve been following these Google Analytics posts, you’ve probably come to see website analysis as a sort of sleuthing. You look at a report, notice a pattern or anomaly & try to understand why that is occurring & what you can do about it.

Sometimes you’ll see something out of the ordinary that seems surprising at first, but then makes sense once you use your detective skills to figure out the cause.  Sometimes the cause is obvious, or sometimes it takes a bit of digging around into internal operations like marketing or events, external influences like news articles, or historical website changes.  Things like:

• A big spike in traffic last week? That was the national news article everyone was so excited about.
• The change in pageviews last month? That was the homepage redesign that you’ve been preparing for months.
• The drop in traffic that never recovered? That was when you started filtering out traffic from internal IP addresses.
• The increase in traffic that wasn’t associated with any events? Your SEO efforts started paying off & you started ranking on page 1 of Google for an important search term.

Whether the answer was obvious or a tough case to crack, it’s likely that it will become a mystery again in another year or two (or maybe in a matter of months).

Did you know that you can make notes right on the graphs in Google Analytics?

Just go into any graph, hover over a date, and click “add new annotation”.

You'll see a short form

You can make your note private, or make it available to anyone with access to your organization’s analytics account. This can be really helpful if multiple people at your organization are using Google analytics. The marketing person can make notes about campaigns and the web person can make notes about website changes, stopping confusion before it even happens.

Even if you’re the only person at your organization, annotations are often a lot easier than searching through old emails to see why that weird spike happened this time last year.

The annotation is tied to the date, not the graph or metric.  Once you put an annotation on a date, you will see it on all graphs that cover that date. So no matter what graph you are looking at, you will be aware of important events that might have affected the data.

Leave a comment if you have an interesting way that annotations could help you in your work!

Usability Lab at Summit 2011

Are you going to Convio's 2011 Summit in October?

Do you want to share your opinions so that we can make Convio more user-friendly?

The Convio Usability Lab will be back for its 4th year. No white coats or mad scientists here, just a team of user experience professionals who will be waiting to hear your opinions so we can make Convio software easier to use.

The process is simple. When you get to Summit, stop by the Usability Lab and sign up for a 30 minute time slot on one of the subjects we’re researching. At your appointment time, you’ll sit down at a computer with a User Experience professional who will walk you through mock-ups of potential changes, or let you interact with a prototype or existing functionality and give feedback.

We want to make sure any changes we’re making to our software improve the user experience, but the only way for us to know is to get feedback from you, the users. Your participation in our research will help us make Convio software better for you. Even better, by participating you’ll be entered in a drawing for an iPod touch!

Even if you’re pressed for time, stop by the Usability Lab to take our super-short Usability Survey. The first 50 people who take the survey will receive a $5 Starbucks gift card!

The Usability lab is open at the following times

• Monday 11am to 5pm
• Tuesday 9am to 4pm
• Wednesday 8:30am to 2pm

Come by, say hi, and let us know how we can make Convio better for you!

Google Analytics - Site Search

This post is the fifth in an ongoing series about Google Analytics. As we proceed, I’ll share tips on how you can use this tool to gain more insight into your online marketing. I’ll start off with the basics, but then we’ll get into some advanced techniques.

If you’re not yet familiar with Google Analytics, it’s a free tool from Google that you can add to your site to give you information about how people are coming to your website and how they behave when they get there. Read the first post for an overview of the Dashboard and the second and third posts for a tour through some of the most useful reports around visitors & even more exciting reports about visitors and the fourth post on excluding internal traffic from Google Analytics reports

When you think of search engines, you probably think of Google, but maybe not Google Analytics. Your site probably has search functionality, so use Google analytics to track it.

Why should be interested? If you find things that people are searching for, maybe they need to be promoted more heavily on your site. People often browse individual websites and only search as a last resort (ecommerce sites are notable exceptions to this rule). Or maybe you use a different term for something than users do. If your site talked about a "put yourself on the pathway towards victory" program, but users often search for "buy a brick", then you maybe you need to add user-centered language to your promotions.

Most popular website search widgets are pretty easy to track through Google Analytics. To set up site search tracking, first, find your search parameters:

• Do a search on your site
• Look at the URL of the search results page. It will include something like ?query=stuff
• Query would be your search parameter
• Do a new search from the search results page
• The URL may now include something like ?q=things
• Q would be another search parameter

Next, go to your profile and click "Edit". In the top area, turn on site search, and enter your search parameters.

Now your profile will start collecting data on searches. Wait a few days or a few weeks, and then look at the site search report under the content heading. You'll now be able to see what percentage of visitors use search. Depending on the nature of your site, that might be a high or low number, but pay attention if it changes significantly over time.

Results page views per search is the number of pages people sort through before finding an appropriate link. The example below shows people view 2.65 pages before finding the right link. How many pages to you sort through on Google or Bing before you get frustrated? This report also tells you that 30% of people exit after searching and 9% refine their searches. A search refinement is when someone does a second search from the search page, as you tested when discovering your search parameters.

This data below shows that visitors might not be having a good experience with the search functionality. To see where the problem lies, look at what search terms visitors used on your site by clicking on "which search terms did visitors use" on the right of this page.

When you get to the report on individual search terms, you can see that some search terms seem to give more successful results than others. Item 4 in the list below has only a 7% search exit rate, while item #5 has a 67% search exit rate. Look at the search results for keywords like item 5 and try to figure out what they were looking for. This might be a case where people are searching for "buy a brick" and your page only refers to the program in other terms. Just adding a sentence with the words "buy a brick" to your program page could make those search results instantly more relevant.

Also pay attention to items like search term #1. What might those visitors be looking for and finding on page 4 or 5? If you use Google's enterprise search tool, you can manually adjust results for your most popular keywords. If not, try guessing at what pages would be relevant and adding the keyword to that page and perhaps even page title.

Yes, that's a lot of work, but doing that for the top 10 search terms with poor results might create enough benefit to be worthwhile, especially if some of the failed searches are around donation programs

Post a reply if you have seen anything interested through looking at your website's site search data! I'll be back next month with more exciting tips on Google Analytics!

Intro to Google Analytics - Part 4

This post is the fourth in an ongoing series about Google Analytics. As we proceed, I’ll share tips on how you can use this tool to gain more insight into your online marketing. I’ll start off with the basics, but then we’ll get into some advanced techniques.

If you’re not yet familiar with Google Analytics, it’s a free tool from Google that you can add to your site to give you information about how people are coming to your website and how they behave when they get there. Read the first post for an overview of the Dashboard and the second and third posts for a tour through some of the most useful reports around visitors & even more exciting reports about visitors

Now let's refine what visitors we're looking at. In its default state, Google Analytics tracks all activity on your website. You might find that employees or volunteers at your organization use your website frequently throughout the day. Their usage patterns are likely very different from those of your constituents, and you’re looking to track constituent engagement, not employee engagement. (Well, tracking employee engagement is great too, but Google Analytics is not the tool for that!).  Most organizations would rather see information on just external visitors and remove the traffic from inside the organization.

If you haven’t already filtered out your internal traffic, this post will cover how to set up that filter and track what affects it has on your data.

First, check with your IT person to see if your IP address is static or dynamic.  Your home internet service probably gives you a temporary IP address which changes regularly. That is a dynamic IP. That is difficult to block in Google Analytics . Your office might have a dedicated IP address that does not typically change. Your IT person should be able to tell you which you have and what the IP address is.

Now, go into Google analytics and add a new profile (not a new account). When changing settings like this, it is best to make the changes on a test profile. This filter may affect your key metrics, and you’ll want to make sure to be able to quantify the effect it has made on your data.

Be sure to select “Add a profile for an existing domain”. Leave the URL & time zone information the same as your existing profile, and name it something like “Internal Traffic Filter”. Save and you’ll return to the main screen.

Now, select “edit” next to your new profile. Scroll down to the filter section and click on “add a filter”.

Select “add a new filter”, name it something having to do with removing internal traffic, use the predefined filter to exclude traffic from the IP address that your IT department has given you. Then save your changes, and your filter should be set up.

If your main profile has any other filters applied to it, copy those to your test profile as well.

After a couple of days, look to make sure your test profile has removed visits. Take a note of the number of visits and pageviews the filter has removed. If it is a noticeable percentage, wait for about a month of data and record the changes the filter has made. This may come in handy if monthly or yearly comparisons are made and people wonder why traffic dropped.

Take a look at any other metrics you track regularly and see if there has been a significant change. For example, if you filtered out a lot of internal visits that included a large number of page views per visit, that could significantly reduce your average pageviews per visit. Average time on site and percentage of new versus recurring visitors could also be affected. Once again, if there are noticeable changes in any of the metrics your organization pays attention to, gather about a month of data in both profiles and calculate and record the change the filter has made in the data.

After you have recorded the deltas in your benchmark metrics, you have 2 options.

1.    Leave both profiles up. Add goals and any other customizations you have to the new profile. This will allow you to see your original data any time you would like. This does mean that any other filters or goals you set up in one account would need to be replicated in the other.
2.    Add the IP filters to your original profile & delete the newer test profile. If you did not see significant changes or had not done historical benchmarking, it might not be worthwhile to maintain two profiles.

Do not delete your original profile. Profiles only have data going forward from when they were created. If you keep the new one and delete the old one, you will lose a lot of historical data.

Check back next month for more Google analytics tips for nonprofits! Post a comment if you’ve seen a change in your metrics after excluding internal traffic.