TOOLKITS
Analytics
How to evaluate the impact of your online communications
Created by Transport for All and Inclusion London, with the support of London Councils
What is analytics? When people visit webpages they leave marks (IP address, cookies). Those marks are collected by services such as Twitter or Google. Analytics is about analysing those data, which will help you making better decisions. Thanks to analytics you can collect information about: • People’s profile (age, gender, professional situation, single or married) • People’s Behaviour (what are they doing on your website, what are they doing when they receive your e-newsletter) • People’s interests (what people like, where people find your organisation’s information) • Geographical info (from where do visitors on your website come from. Are your followers on Facebook mostly in London or outside London?) • Devices people used (web browser, computer/tablet/ smartphone).
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How can analytics help your organisation? Analytics gives you the power to: • analyse if a campaign is working or not and precisely identify issues. For example, if you’ve just sent an email out to promote donations, you could know - as it happens - how many people open your email and how many people click onto the donate button. • rectify a communications campaign or improve future communications strategy. For example, if you realise that a low number of people opened your email promoting donations, you could resend one with a new subject line. • convince your team of the importance of the communications strategy you would like to develop. For example, analytics could show how many people visit your website from a mobile phone. If it’s a high number, it could convince your team of the necessity to redesign your old website to make it responsive. There are many of analytics tools online. This toolkit will present some of them and the most interesting information you can get.
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Analytics Tools Bit.ly reports Bit.ly is an online service shortening URL. It is particularly useful when you want to share a link on social media (e.g. Twitter). Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly collect datas about your links. You can therefore get information about: • The number of clicks on your links. • The platform (Facebook, Twitter, websites, emails) from which people clicked on your link • The time and date when people clicked. • The country from which people clicked (not that interesting if you are a London based organisation) This is a particularly interesting tool if you want to know which subjects are the most interesting to your social media community.
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Mailchimp reports Mailchimp is an email marketing service provider used by 7 million users. Over 10 billion emails are sent through the service each month. It is based on 3 simple tasks: • Create list of contacts • Create an email (newsletter, campaign) • Get reports about your emails. After you send your email or e-newsletter, Mailchimp offers you a precised and comprehensive report about it.
The most interesting feature is the list of people who opened / didn’t open / clicked / didn’t clicked on a link. This means you can see where your communications went wrong or not. You can also resend your email to those who didn’t open it the first time.
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Twitter Analytics Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140 character messages called «tweets». Twitter has more than 500 million users, out of which more than 284 million are active users. It offers analytics for example about: • The number of time users interacted with your Tweet (retweet, favourite, answer) • Top interests of your followers • Location of your followers There are lots of online tools which can help you to get even more interesting information. One of them is followerwonk.com. This service offers for example the possibility to know the most active hours of your followers and compare it to your organisation’s most active hours on Twitter.
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Google Analytics Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources. It’s the most widely used website statistics service and the basic service is free. You can get a huge amount of information and it’s easy to get lost. However there are a few statistics which could help you make the right decisions, for example: • Number of vistors (+difference between new visitors and returning visitors) • Duration of each visit • Where people come from • Keywords used by visitors on search engine before visiting your page The most interesting information is probably the ‘users flow’. It gives you a visual representation of the journey of your website’s visitors. You can easily identify where people lose interest or in contrary if your web strategy works. For example, if your priority is to encourage visitors to visit a specific webpage (donation, membership) from your homepage, this could help you to see if your strategy works or not.
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For more information For more information please visit: • for Twitter: https://analytics.twitter.com/about • for Mailchimp: http://kb.mailchimp.com/ • for Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/why/ • for Bit.ly: https://bitly.com/
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