You know your audience like the back of your hand, right? Without hard data, however, you may not know them nearly as well as you think. What do they want? Where do they come from? What do they think about you? These are the kind of questions business intelligence answers, and Google Analytics helps you tap into that intelligence. It connects the dots between you and your audience through your website, helping you communicate more efficiently and make better business decisions. In this session, Mark Farmer will take you from the basics of Google Analytics, the most popular web statistics package for nonprofits, through some of the more advanced features. By the end you’ll understand how to track your visitors and their behavior, profile them, create goals and much more. Takeaways: - A solid understanding of online statistics and how they can benefit you and your organization - Firm knowledge of how to get started with Google Analytics - A roadmap for how to dive deeper and get even more out of your statistics

1. Google Analytics:
Business Intelligence
for Non-Profits

2. Mark Farmer
Founder & Chief Webhead

3. Gettin’ Analytical

4. My Modus Operandi: info-bombing
• Hang onto your hats.
• My information is the bomb.

5. What’s in it for you
• In a sea of arbitrary measures
of success, it’s the least
arbitrary & most impactful
• People vote with their clicks.
• It’s the intelligence that lets you know what you’re doing
well and what needs improvement.
• Helps you discover the hidden interactions happening
every day on your website, the ‘untold stories’.

6. Business Intelligence
• If you can track what visitors to
your site are doing, you can
optimize their experience.
• For an e-commerce site, this means
$ in the bank.
• For non-profits, this also means $ in the bank
(more visitors = more users = more sponsorships
& other opportunities).
• It also means greater engagement & greater satisfaction
through better content & better usability.

7. Analytics
• Why is it so important to track
visitors?
– Everyone says they know their
audience really well.
– Most organizations don’t know their
audience nearly as well as they think.
– They’re not perfect, but site statistics
don’t have an agenda, and they’re
brutally frank.

8. Analytics = Flaky
• Historical data
– Look at June 6 today
– Tomorrow we look at June 6 again
– Data can shift
• Sampling
– 500,000 + data points (visits)
• “Fast access mode”

9. Fast Access

10. Why Google created Analytics

11. Avinash Kaushik
“Data quality sucks. Let’s just get over it.”
kaushik.net/avinash/2006/06/data-quality-sucks-lets-just-get-over-it.html

12. New Analytics vs. Old Analytics
• Extra flakiness
• Extra goodness
• Coming soon to a Goog near you
• Get to know both: you don’t know when you’ll need one or
the other.

13. Jazzin’ it up.
Credit: Tobias Andersson Åkerblom
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41402540@N02/465600207

14. The basics
• What it looks like
• Profiles
• Filters
• Users

15. Dashboard: command central

16. Custom reports

17. Advanced segments: awesome sauce

18. Intelligence alerts

19. Navigation summary

20. Goals & funnels

21. Getting advanced
• Event tracking
• Virtual pageviews: _trackPageview()
• E-commerce

22. Goals in Action

23. Goals in Action

24. In-page analytics
• Used to show clicks on a link
• Convenient way to pop around the site and see what’s
what.

25. Super cool: visualizations
• Apps: http://www.google.com/analytics/apps
• Gadget gallery:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gadgetgallery.html

26. Other tools
• Google Website Optimizer: google.com/analytics/siteopt/
• Google URL Builder:
google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578
• Clicktale.com – heat mapping via cursor trails
• Pion: atomiclabs.com

27. Recommendations
• Harvest business intelligence, not “we’re down 2% this
quarter.”
• Find the stories behind the numbers, the stories that paint
a picture of user behaviour.

28. Thank you
• E-mail: markfarmer@webness.biz
• Website: webness.biz
• Blog: webheresies.com
• twitter.com/markus64
• facebook.com/markus64
• ca.linkedin.com/in/markfarmer64