Google Analytics: PVSWiki

Google Analytics

Table of Contents

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is our primary mechanism for evaluating our website traffic and the sources of donations made on our website. There are five separate active Analytics properties as of 2020: one for our legacy website ("Project Vote Smart"), one for our new website ("justfacts.votesmart"), one for the VoteEasy app ("VoteEasy"), one for the blog ("Vote Smart Blog"), and one for all of these properties combined ("VoteSmart.org (all subdomains)").

Understanding the Data
At its root, Google Analytics operates based on URLs (Uniform Resource Locator), which are precise locations of items on the web. Precise URLs are necessary to pinpoint traffic, generate good data, and determine successful outcomes. For instance, it’s useful that votesmart.org/bills/IA/2017/… is logically structured. On the other hand, note that voteeasy.votesmart.org/candidate/78533 does not offer a data point identifier (as a result of data views generated within one page/ URL). This limits the specificity of the data we can report on VoteEasy.

Historical data beyond 2012 or so is not available on Google Analytics- previously we were using a different tracking system (Urchin Analytics).

Recurring issues with data include:

Periods where GA was not logging donations properly, or logging at all
Sources/Mediums can be misleading due to staff not consistently using the appropriate UTM variables

Definitions of Common Terms:

Session - a measure of a “visit” to your website that can include multiple interactions with the site
Session duration - a measure of the amount of time a user spends actively engaging with your website.
Event - a type of hit which tracks user interactions with content like downloads, mobile ad clicks, Flash elements and video plays.
Bounce rate - percentage of sessions in which a user left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page.
Exit Rate - how often users end their session or leave the site after viewing that particular page.
User - a unique visitor to your site, as defined by the device they are using, tracked by cookies. Note that this is generally an overestimate of website traffic because a) one person can use multiple devices and b) browser cookies can be reset manually or by a device reset.
Pages:

Page Views - the total count of how many times any user lands on an individual page on your website.
Unique page views - how many times a page was accessed at least once during a session (this is a more accurate representation of page views because it counts each user only once; in many ways, it’s also a more accurate measure of traffic than users).
Landing Page - the first page a user accesses at the beginning of a session.
Exit Page - the last page that a user visits before they exit the website.

Traffic:

Traffic source - any place from which people are directed to your site, such as a search engine, social network or other website
Direct traffic - a user accesses your site via a bookmark, or by entering its URL straight into their browser’s address bar.
Organic traffic - users who find your website ‘organically’ through search results, as opposed to via a paid ad, clicking a link on another site, or from a bookmark they already have saved.
Paid traffic - the amount of visitors to your site who came there via Google Adwords ads.
Referral traffic - visitors to your site who are sent there, or referred, from a direct link on another platform (website, email, etc.).

Google Analytics Inputs - What information do I want to look at?

Date Range (top right corner):

Today

Note that the data is always several hours behind.
“Real Time” data is available on the lefthand toolbar

Yesterday, Last Week/Month/etc.
Custom: set your own dates
Compare to:

In order to generate context, you can set a date range and then compare to a similar period in past months/years/election or financial cycles
Note that these will not necessarily provide directly comparable periods. For instance, if you use the same dates over two different years, weekdays will not match up exactly. This will mean that the one graph might be slightly askew.

Metrics (above graphs/graphics):

You can change the metric measured on the y-axis of most graphs. This includes:

Page views or sesions
Revenue or number of donations

You can also change the time frame on the x-axis. The options are:

Hourly
Day
Week
Month

Google Analytics Tracking Capabilities - ordered by lefthand toolbar

Audience: “I want information on what votesmart.org users are like”

Overview

Number of users who visited site
Number of unique visitors
New versus returning visitors
Bounce rate

Demographics → Age/ Gender
Interests → overview (hobbies, etc.)
Geo → Location (including state)/ Language
Behavior

New/ Returning - have they been on our website before?
Frequency & recency - how many people viewed x amount of pages?

Engagement

How many seconds did users stay on the site?
How many pages “deep” did users go on the site?

Technology

Browser & OS - were they browsing in Chrome, Safari, etc.?
Network - what internet provider was used?
Mobile - was page accessed on desktop, mobile, or tablet?

Acquisition: “I want to find out how people got to votesmart.org”

Overview

Shows each type of channel (direct search, referral, social, etc.). Click on a channel and you can see which pages users were referred to most frequently by organic search.

All Traffic

Channels:

Shows all 7 channels: Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Social, (Other), Paid Search, Email
Click on a channel to see which referrals were most common in each channel.

Source/ Medium: Shows which sources (search engines, websites, etc.) directed people to the site most frequently.

Source: the origin of your traffic, such as a search engine (for example, google) or a domain (example.com).
Medium: the general category of the source, for example, organic search (organic), cost-per-click paid search (cpc), web referral
This can be very helpful! If you know what you urchined something, you can search for it here.

Referral: Google's method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine.

Google Ads

Campaigns - shows how many clicks came to your website via a GoogleAdwords campaign.

You can click on the campaign name to see the most popular words that were searched.
This information can also be found in GoogleAdwords

Social

Network Referrals - shows which social networks (Facebook, Twitter) referred the most people to the website. Click on a social network to see which page within the social network the user came from.
Landing pages - most common votesmart.org pages that users were directed to from their social network.
Conversions - how many people donated as the result of being directed to votesmart.org from a social network.

To find how many donations we have gotten from Facebook, this is the place that you want to go.

Behavior: “I want to find out what people did once they got onto votesmart.org.”

Site Content

All pages - You can search for any page on our website here, and see the most frequently viewed pages.

Note that “votesmart.org” is assumed as the first part of the page.
However, it is usually better to view these things under “Content Drilldown.” Content drilldown mimics the way that our website is organized, rather than providing every single webpage in a list format.

Content drilldown - This shows the most popular pages on our website, grouped by page paths (ex. Candidate, elections, interest-groups).

To search for the Help Us page, you will just have to type “/help-us” into the search bar.
This is where you want to go to see which pages on our website are viewed most frequently.
You can find out how people got to these pages, by changing the secondary dimension to “source/ medium.”
You can drill down into a page path by clicking on the path name.

Landing pages - This shows the first page that a user viewed on our website during their session. You can see the most common pages that were visited first.
Exit pages - This shows the last page that a user viewed before leaving the website. You can see the most common pages that were exited last.

Events

Overview

This is where one can go to find out information on the popup.
Under “event category”, click on “Popup Donation form”

Conversions: “I want to know how donations were made on votesmart.org”

Goals - These are benchmarks for “success” that have been designated by PVS.

“Success,” meaning how well our site or app fulfills our target objectives.
Overview - You can go to this page and see all of your goals, and how many have been completed.

To set up a new goal you need to go to Admin → View → Goals.

URL’s - here you can see what designates a completed goal. Two examples are:

Getting directed to the donate thank you page
Signing up for the E-newsletter

Ecommerce - This is the section where you can see the amount of donations coming in.

Overview - Here you can see the revenue, amount of transactions, conversion rates, and various “products.” Please keep in mind that these amounts can be slightly off - it is best to double check DonorPerfect.

“Unknown” donation/ subscriptions refer to donations/ recurring transactions made via the “/donate” page.
“Regular” donation/ subscriptions refer to donations/ recurring transactions made via the “/help-us” page.

Product Performance - This breaks down each type of donation and tells you analytics on your sales from each of them

You should be able to go to this section, click on a donation type, and change “secondary dimension” to “source/ medium”, then see where all of your donations came from, however there is something wrong with our Google Analytics where it directs it all as coming from CyberSource.

Multi-Channel Funnels

Assisted Conversions - Assisted Conversions counts all conversions in which a channel was a non-last interaction. This basically helps you to see source/mediums that brought a user to the website, prior to them being converted.

- Note that "Conversions" by default include all possible types: donations, subscriptions, etc. Much of the time, you will only be concerned with donations. In order to limit the conversion type to donations only, select the "Conversion" drop down and tick only the "Ecommerce" box. Other types of conversions are in this menu.
- The specific path to measure the number of donations from an email is: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions > Within Conversion type, filter only "Ecommerce" > Email > Secondary dimension=Ad Content

Feeling comfortable with Analytics? Go in depth with Google’s Training. They dive deeper into setting goals and tracking campaigns, amongst other things.

PVSWiki : GoogleAnalytics