Question from Gail Fuller, director of communications, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, (212) ,

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1 Dear Members, Below is a summary of the responses to question posted to the listserve. The information is compiled from s submitted to us by the Communications Network member who posted the question. Please contact individual members directly for additional follow-up Question from Gail Fuller, director of communications, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, (212) , gfuller@rbf.org Greetings, I am looking to revamp our Website Metrics report. I have a few questions that I would love your input on: 1. In analyzing your website, which web metrics do you find most useful to track? 2. Do you find that a dashboard reporting approach works best when communicating your website metrics to staff? 3. How often do you share your web metrics report with staff? Responses: -- Joshua Tallman, online information manager, The Commonwealth Fund (via Barry Scholl, vice president for publishing and communication,the Commonwealth Fund, (212) , bas@cmwf.org) I've answered your web metrics questions below. I hope you find them to be useful. 1. In analyzing your website, which web metrics do you find most useful to track? The most useful for us are Pageviews, Visits, and Registered users (broken up into , Twitter, and Facebook). Pageviews and Visits are direct representations of users' interaction with our site. We want to see that they are coming to the site, and that, once they are there, they are looking around as opposed to landing on an article and closing the browser tab. Registered users is important to us as it signals the evolution of our audiences' consumption habits. We have been watching our growth slow to a near halt, while social media subscribers is booming. We also report our top ten publications of the month, which is a strong indicator of what our core audience is looking for from us. As Communications staff this metric helps us to determine what sort of treatment we should give to a grant

2 product. Should we produce a ten page brief or a two page summary? Based on the past performance of the topic and/or program we can best make this call. 2. Do you find that a dashboard reporting approach works best when communicating your website metrics to staff? We do not use a dashboard approach to sharing web metrics with staff. All of our shared metrics are broken out into individual PowerPoint slides that provide data over time. We are essentially sharing a series of trend lines when we report. 3. How often do you share your web metrics report with staff? We share our web stats with the executive management team on a monthly basis. The remainder of the staff is not kept apprised of web traffic statistics, though every request for information is granted. We do not hide this information from the remainder of the staff; we just do not share it with them directly, or on any regular basis. -- George Soule, manager of strategic communications, Carnegie Corporation of New York, (212) , gs@carnegie.org [We] no longer generate such reports, though at some point we may revise a variant of these. [When we did] I edited them in such a way that they were (mostly) accessible to non web geeks. [While] I do believe that while they are generally useful, they do not tell as much of a story as many would have you believe. They will not divulge whether you re strategic. Or if you ve had any impact. All in all, they are useful baseline indicators but are nevertheless pretty blunt instruments devoid of any real nuance. I ve begun to scratch my head as to how to arrive at more meaningful measurements of impact both in the social media sphere as well as specific to the web site. There are a few pretty expensive tools that claim to do this such as Radian6, but they re mostly oriented toward businesses. Not us measly non profits/ foundations. Another important finding is that approx. 60 percent of all traffic to our site is users seeking info about one of these topics: employment; grant eligibility. The percentages are about the same at most other similarly-sized grantmakers. So really only 40 percent of the traffic to a foundation s web site are users seeking knowledge product. -- Elizabeth Cahill, senior web strategist, The Atlantic Philanthropies, (212) , e.cahill@atlanticphilanthropies.org Below are answers to your questions. I m curious to find out what you and others

3 are doing as well. 1. In analyzing your website, which web metrics do you find most useful to track? Here s the stuff that we look at within Google Analytics and our /social platforms. How is the health of our website? Page views, visitors, time spent on page, bounces What content are people interested in? Top pages, top downloads, referring traffic sources/trackbacks, analyzing content funnels What else are people looking for and are they finding it? Top searches on our website and referring searches from Google Are people engaging with our content? Social sharing and engagement, influence/klout and potential reach, page views, time spent on page, navigation summary Are we reaching the right audiences? and social media growth, referring traffic sources/trackbacks What s working and what s not? Basically looking at all of the above, identifying the bright spots and where we bombed, and trying to learn from it. We don t report on all of this in our metrics dashboard. Here s what we include on the main dashboard: Page Views Visitors Unique Visitors Video Views Facebook (Likes) Facebook (Active Users) Twitter (Followers) (Subscribers) Top 5 pages Other top performing pages Top 5 report downloads Top 5 Facebook posts (reach/likes/comments/shares) Top 5 Tweets (potential reach and retweets) Impact Highlight evidence that our online work is reaching the right people and/or effective New & Notable new content that we want to bring to staff s attention Our dashboard also lets people drill down to see: Select New Followers on Twitter Top 20 pages Video views on YouTube and our Website

4 Top searches on Google that led to our website and Top Searches on our Website s Internal Search 2. People have been receptive to the dashboard, so I think it s a good way to present overall trends as well as highlight impact on the site. We also do more detailed reports for key initiatives to review what worked and what didn t. Happy to share two examples if that helps. Just let me know. 3. I started off by sharing it with our Comms team on a monthly basis and then we recently rolled it out to Senior Leadership Team and now all staff. --- James Kinser, senior electronic communications specialist, MacArthur Foundation (via Andrew Solomon, vice president, Public Affairs, MacArthur Foundation, asolomon@macfound.org, (312) ) Hello Gail, As Andy mentioned, our approach to web metrics is completely in flux. Historically, we ve produced an annual/semi-annual report that was shared with staff. In the recent year we reconfigured our staffing and expect to have more tailored correspondence with our program area staff. That said, we ll likely develop a whole new data set to share based on each program area s communication plan. Of course, there are basic things that I m always keeping an eye on. They might help guide your communications initiatives but might not be valuable to a general audience. 1. Overall traffic over time: Are there spikes in the web traffic at certain times of the year? Are they associated with specific campaigns? If so, how does traffic compare from year to year? 2. How much time are users spending on the pages? And what pages are they spending the most/least amount of time on? 3. What are exit points (bounces)? 4. What are the most commonly used keywords in search? Additionally, for a snapshot view of traffic during a specified time, I m a fan of CrazyEgg. It s a silly name, but it provides a heat map of your specified pages so that you can visually see where traffic is going, and shows you how far down the page users are scrolling. Of course, GoogleAnalytics is the industry standard which provides the bulk of our data & insight. As for a dashboard, we re currently in the early stages of developing that interface, so I can t really share any insight there. However, frequency of

5 reporting is something that should likely be based on the need for information. For an actively engaged audience monthly is likely more than sufficient. --- Michael Khoo, vice president, director of Digital Strategies, Spitfire Strategies (via Kristin Grimm, president, Spitfire Strategies, Below is a list of actions most groups should be tracking. I'd suggest staff working online meet to analyze and plan reactions to the numbers every month, at least. If they're in large a rapid response campaign, you could justify meeting twice a week. Sharing throughout the organization depends partly on the culture. It could be done through a newsletter, at an all-staff, or by meeting with department heads. Any which way, it should also be done monthly. Visitors Unique Pageviews Pageviews Unique Visits New Visits Return Visitors Click-through rate Bounce Rate Actions Top content Time on site vs. Avg. Time on Site Time on page vs. Avg. Time on Page Traffic Source: Direct & Referrals Keywords Conversion Rate --Liz Banse, vice president, Resource Media, (206) , liz@resourcemedia.org Hi Gail, I saw your query on the Communications Network Discussion Digest and wanted to offer up how Resource Media tracks metrics on our website and other digital properties. Our digital strategy director, Nicole Lampe, track metrics monthly, using the attached dashboard. She also shares the dashboard monthly with

6 colleagues, highlighting the main takeaways in an (to spur us to produce better content, of course!). Her goals are to see incremental growth in traffic, good engagement (as measured by time on site, and/or page depth), our social media and link-building efforts bearing fruit in the form of inbound traffic, and lots of eyeballs on our blog and toolbox, since those are the two areas where we're investing the most time to share our lessons learned. Our co-workers look to her monthly metrics reports to hear which blog posts or newsletter articles are performing the best.