Google Analytics: Business Intelligence

for Non-Profits

Mark Farmer Founder & Chief Webhead

Gettin’ Analytical

My Modus Operandi: info-bombing

• Hang onto your hats.

• My information is the bomb.

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’.

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.

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.

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”

Fast Access

Why Google created Analytics

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

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.

Jazzin’ it up.

Credit: Tobias Andersson Åkerblom

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41402540@N02/465600207

The basics

• What it looks like

• Profiles

• Filters

• Users

Dashboard: command central

Custom reports

Advanced segments: awesome sauce

Intelligence alerts

Navigation summary

Goals & funnels

Getting advanced

• Event tracking

• Virtual pageviews: _trackPageview()

• E-commerce

Goals in Action

Goals in Action

In-page analytics

• Used to show clicks on a link

• Convenient way to pop around the site and see what’s what.

Super cool: visualizations

• Apps: http://www.google.com/analytics/apps

• Gadget gallery: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gadgetgallery.html

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

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.

Thank you

• E-mail: markfarmer@webness.biz

• Website: webness.biz

• Blog: webheresies.com

• twitter.com/markus64

• facebook.com/markus64

• ca.linkedin.com/in/markfarmer64