This workshop from the 2012 Canadian Association of Labour Media conference explores how union locals can use analytics to communicate better with their members and the public.

1. Website Analytics
Ian Clysdale
Communications Officer, CUPE National
iclysdale@cupe.ca
Canadian Association of Labour Media Conference
Saturday May 26, 2012
http://clysdale.ca/calm/website-analytics/

2. Why use analytics?
• We want to know if we’re reaching people
• We want to know who we’re reaching
• We want to know what people are actually reading
• We want to know how people are visiting our sites
• Analytics give us free focus groups

3. What tools are people using?
• Google Analytics
• WordPress (JetPack)
• What else?

4. Google Analytics (Intro)
• For anybody who isn’t using any kind of analytics tools
right now, Google Analytics is probably the best option.
• It’s free, it’s incredibly powerful, and it’s easy to put in
to almost any kind of site.
• Go to http://analytics.google.com/ , and create an
account.
• For static web sites, there will be code you can paste in.
• There are plug-ins for most modern content
management systems – WordPress, Drupal, Joomla,
etc.

5. Google Analytics
(The Very Fine Manual)
• Google provides a huge amount of free training
material for Analytics, which is now easy to find.
• From the main Analytics page, click the “Learn” tab
at the top
• There are guides – everything from a simple “Getting
started” checklist to in-depth video guides covering
everything I‟m going to be talking about today.
• What they won‟t talk about, of course, is the kinds of
information that we need to know as labour
communicators.

6. Google Analytics (Your Dashboard)
• Gives you quick graphs on a number of different
things, if you‟re the kind of person who likes to look
at things regularly
• We‟ll explain what each of them is in slightly more
detail in the next few slides
• Once you know what things you want on this, you
can swap them “Add widgets,” “move around”
• You can also have several different dashboards

7. Google Analytics (The Basics)
• For each of “Audience,” “Advertising,” “Traffic
Sources,” “Content” and “Conversions”, there‟s an
overview page that gives you the basics quickly.
• Audience: How many, where are they from, how are
they looking at the site?
• Traffic Sources: How are people finding your site?
What search terms are they searching on to end up
at your site? What sites are linking to you that you
might want to know about?

8. Google Analytics (The Basics)
• Content: What pages on your site are people
visiting?
• Goals: For major campaigns where you want people
to take an action, you can measure how much
success you‟re having with it.

9. Google Analytics (In-Page)
• This is an incredible way to see how people navigate
your site.
• Start on any page, and see what percentage of
people went from that page to all of the other
available options.
• Need to cut out menu options? See which ones are
useful to people.

10. Google Analytics (Email reports)
• For any report, you can click on the “Email” link at
the top to have it emailed to you (or someone else in
the organization) at some level of frequency.
• You can customize a dashtop and have that sent
out, combining different kinds of reports
• This can be where having several different dashtops
can be very useful

11. Google Analytics (Annotations)
• Annotations let you leave yourself little notes, so that
when you‟re looking back later and want to
understand what happened, it‟s easy.
• From any timeline graph, click the down arrow under
it, and create new annotation

12. Google Analytics (Real-Time)
• Click “Home” at the top, then “Real-Time”
• You can actually see who is visiting your site
and what they‟re looking at in real time
• How can we use this information? When might
we want to do this?

13. Google Analytics (Custom Variables)
• Google Analytics is incredibly powerful in that it lets you
attach your own custom variables to each page, and then
sort based on them.
• We are planning to move to a new cupe.ca and get a rid of a
lot of our old content, so we attached „date created‟ and
„date modified‟ fields to all our pages
• We can now see what old content is still getting used, which
will help us easily only move old content that is still being
useful
• What other ideas do people have for custom variables we
might want to use?

14. What else can we analyze?
• Sold on the idea that analytics can help us sharpen our
messages and produce better and more compelling
content?
• We can do analytics for most other online tools:
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Campaign email
• Twitter?

15. Facebook Insights
• Insights are only available for pages – not for
groups, and not for individual users
• If you‟re logged in, there will be a link at the top of
your page
• Insights let you know, for everything posted to your
page, how many people actually saw it
• It also lets you see how many times it was shared,
liked, etc in one place

16. YouTube Insights
• For YouTube videos, you can also see
demographics, where videos were shared, views
over time, comments and likes all in one place
• One of the most useful features of YouTube Insights
is the “audience retention” option – which answers
the difficult question of “is my online video too long?”

17. How do we analyze Twitter?
• Twitter has been promising an analytics tool of some kind
for many years at this point
• To a certain degree, the hole is being filled by klout.com –
but there are all sorts of questions about how useful those
calculations are.
• There are a bunch of other tools that do some of what we
might want for Twitter analytics:
http://twittertoolsbook.com/10-awesome-twitter-analytics-
visualization-tools/ is a list from a few weeks ago.
• Basically, though, we‟re still guessing at how many people
actually really read our tweets, unlike with Facebook
insights

18. Analyzing campaign email
• Modern campaign email tools let us do this with our campaign email
as well
• The big three players are MailChimp, MadMimi and Constant Contact
• Who is using these? What are your experiences?
• What can we measure:
• How many of our messages were opened?
• How many click-throughs did we get?
• Where are the people who are reading our messages?

19. Campaign email: Split A|B Testing
• One of the most powerful things that we can do with
measurements on campaign email is split testing:
• Write two different versions of a message, or two subject
lines
• Send each of the two versions to about 10% of your list,
and see which gets more opens or clickthroughs
• Send the more successful version to the remaining 80%
• It’s possible to use real-time analytics to do this with
really critical web content as well.

20. Questions
• What have we not talked about that you‟ve learned
the hard way?
• What are the smart ways that we as labour
communicators can be using these tools?