1. What will I learn?

• Structure your stats reporting under common themes that will work consistently across your website, content and social media channels
• Benchmark the current performance across your digital channels
• Set targets using SMART Key Performance Indicators
• Look for trends and add narrative to your reports to help you land key points with stakeholders

2. Why report?

The great thing about digital channels is you can easily create evidence-based strategies because you will always have the data to inform your decisions. But it’s important to create some structure and consistency around how you gather stats and report so that:

• You understand what digital activity is performing well so you can do more of this and change or fix anything that isn’t performing well
• You can report to funders and stakeholders when you need to
• You can set long term targets for your activity and measure how you’re are performing against these
• You can make contextual comparisons over time and identify trends.

You should choose consistent metrics to include in your reports. If ‘website sessions’ is one of the metrics, you choose to illustrate reach then make sure you always report ‘sessions’ so you establish consistency.

Benchmarking
It’s important to commit to a regular frequency of reporting, this will allow you to contextualise your stats and make useful comparisons for example, month-on-month, year-on-year or campaign-on-campaign.

Who is the audience for your reports?
It’s crucial that when you’re considering what information to include in your reports you need to think about who will be reading them – in other words who is your audience? If the reports are for your web and content producers, they will probably already have a pre-existing understanding of your channels and content. They may be using stats to directly inform the decision-making in their day-to-day jobs – so detail may be very important to them, for this reason their attention spans may be longer than other stakeholders. By comparison if you are reporting to non-digital stakeholders say your Directors, Board, or other teams, they may have little or even no pre-existing knowledge and understanding about your content and channels, for this reason they may also have shorter attention spans, so summary level reports will be more appropriate than detail for these people. They may also need you to add more context to your stats with supporting narrative text – so that the numbers in your reports actually mean something to them.

3. Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are just statistical targets that you should set yourself to work towards. The important thing is that they are SMART, which stands for:

• Specific – so instead of ‘increase brand awareness’ you could say ‘drive more traffic to our website’
• Measurable – means instead of just ‘Drive more traffic’ you could say ‘Drive 10% more sessions to our website’ – the metric is now specified as ‘sessions’ and the target amount to increase by specified as ‘10%’
• Achievable – means realistic for you – set targets based on your own capability. Set your own baselines looking back at the last 12 months of your stats rather than looking at national or global channel benchmarks
• Time-bound – give yourself a realistic timespan to deliver the growth you set in your targets – say 12 months for example.

So a good KPI could be expressed: ‘Drive 10% more sessions to our website by March 2022’

4. How to report consistently across different digital channels

All digital channels have different metrics and ways of reporting, so the challenge is often to find a consistent narrative when reporting your stats across all channels. Try grouping your stats under these three themes:

Reach – this is the number of times your content or channel was seen – the metrics to look at for this could be website sessions or social media channel impressions for example.

Engagement – this is what proportion of the people seeing your content interacted with it in some way – the metrics to look at for this could include website pages viewed per session or social media, likes, comments and shares.

Conversion – if you are an organisation, for example, that sells tickets, products or memberships – a good conversion metric could be revenue. If your organisation doesn’t sell anything there may be other task completions that you could use as good conversion metrics, for example newsletter sign-ups or donations.

These three themes will work for both your websites and your social media channels, and you will be able to fit relatable metrics under each theme channel by channel as shown in the example below.

How to fit website analytics into these themes
Google analytics is the best platform to use for reporting website stats. It allows you to set the dates for your reporting period and also to set dates for comparison. Reach tells you how much awareness there is of your organisation. The best website metrics to look at for reach are:

• Sessions – this is the number of visits to your website in a given period of time (by default, a session lasts until there’s 30-minutes of inactivity)
• Users – which is defined as an individual (or IP address), visiting your website – a single user may have many ‘sessions’ (i.e. visits to your website) in the same month

Compare different periods and add some narrative in your reports to explain what may have caused the increases or decreases that you are reporting.

Acquisition
Another useful website metric to report under the header of reach is where the traffic to your website is coming from. To see this go into the Acquisition menu in Google Analytics and scroll down to Channels. The proportion of total traffic coming from each channel is expressed as a percentage.

Organic search is a useful reach metric to report – this is people searching for keywords and phrases on Google and other search engines and ending up on your site. You should be getting the majority of your traffic referred from organic search and if you’re not you need to optimise your website better.

A word about search engine optimisation (SEO)
It’s very important to ensure your website is well optimised for search engines and that the most popular search queries relating to your business are reflected in the copy you use on your site. This will help to ensure that your website appears high up in search engine results pages.

Here are a few things you can do to help your SEO:

• Make sure your website loads its pages as fast as possible
• Ensure your site is well optimised for mobile users – Google will favour sites that are
• Use meaningful page titles that are descriptive of page content
• Use natural language and relevant keywords in your body copy and headers
• Make sure every page has a good meta description
• Make sure you are using alt text on your images
• Create great content – good quality editorial that is keyword rich can really help you draw new audiences to your site from search engine queries.

Setting benchmarks
If you look back at your percentage of referrals from organic search, email and social media over the last 12 months you can set benchmarks for a year average and then report monthly on how you perform against the year averages. Increasing the percentage of traffic referred to your website from organic search – would make a really good KPI.

Using Google tracking URLs
When you are driving traffic to your website from paid or organic social, email marketing or paid ads, it’s really important to use tracking urls so that you can effectively monitor the most successful sources sending your traffic.

The best way to do this is by using Google Campaign URL Builder. This tool is free and really easy to use and the data plugs straight into your Google Analytics reports. You just use the fields to input labels to help you identify the specific sources driving traffic, for example, a Facebook ad or a specific e-newsletter. The form generates a unique URL that you can then use as the link in your ad or e-newsletter.

By standardising the labels you use in each of the designated fields, you can even track how effective different advertising creatives were across the same campaign. All the fields marked with an asterisk are mandatory for the data to make sense, but you can choose which others you might want to use in addition to these based on your own needs.
To see these stats in Google Analytics just drill down to Campaigns in the Acquisition menu:

You can also toggle in the sub menu to drill down further:

Engagement
Engagement metrics help to verify that you are providing your users with content that is useful and interesting to them. There are four really useful website metrics to look at to help you report engagement consistently:

• Top viewed pages
• Bounce rate
• Pages per session
• Session duration

Compare your top 10 pages month-on-month or year-on-year. If you have a campaign running to promote certain pages, is it working? Add some narrative that pulls out any key findings. For example:

• Is a new page suddenly appearing in your top three? What’s causing this?
• Has a popular page dropped out of the top 10 this year compared to last year? Why might this be?

Bounce rate
If you’re getting lots of traffic to your site but the users bounce out after seeing one page then something isn’t right. You should be aiming to signpost people to onward journeys on your site, so ideally you want to try and keep your bounce rate as low as possible. Look back at the last 12 months and establish your average bounce rate then compare your monthly stats against this baseline. Trying to reduce your bounce rate could be a good KPI to work towards.

Session duration and pages per session
Average session duration is how long a user spends on your site during one session in a single day. Pages per session is how many pages a user looked at during their visit. The longer people stay on your site the more engaged they are – and the more pages they look at during their session the more engaged they are.

*Bear in mind the caveat that looking at a high number of pages in a single session can also be because users can’t easily find what they are looking for and consider this in your analysis. You could solve this problem by using clearer page titles or better signposting, for example.

5. How to fit social media metrics under the reach, engagement and conversion themes

Reach – Social media metrics like ‘total followers’ and ‘total impressions’ are comparable to website reach metrics like ‘sessions’ and ‘users’ in Google Analytics.

Engagement – Shares, comments and Likes align with website engagement stats such as Pages visited, Time on site and Bounce rate. Report your top performing posts – these will be the ones with the best reach and engagement. If you produce video content, then you could also include engagement metrics like Video Views too.

Conversion – could again equate to revenue or the completion of other tasks you want users to perform.

Targets and benchmarks
For each social media channel, based on your past stats, you can establish a baseline for what constitutes ‘good’ levels of reach and engagement and based on this set targets for how your future posts perform using metrics like:

• average reach/impressions
• average number of Likes
• average number of comments

Compare your month-on-month stats and look for trends, are you seeing:

• Positive trends like – followers and post interactions increasing month on month?
• Or negative trends like month on month decreasing engagement and follower numbers?

Examine the content you posted during this period and your posting rhythm and use this to explain in your narrative what the causes for these trends might be. Did your posting frequency drop or did you post less content with images for example?

Once you’ve done this, for each new report you can easily see which posts are performing above or below average and refer to this in your narrative.

Reporting layouts
Try laying out your web and social media reports in tables like this so that your stakeholders can see the consistency across your reporting.

6. Recap

• Use the themes Reach, Engagement and Conversion to group metrics across your website and social media channels. This will give you a consistent way to structure your stats reports.
• When constructing your reports always consider the needs of the audience that will be reading them
• Report at regular intervals – ideally monthly
• Don’t just report numbers in isolation – always contextualise your stats using like for like comparisons and add narrative explanation to explain what’s happening and why
• And finally… don’t forget to act on your findings so you can do more of what works well and less of what doesn’t!

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Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence

Please attribute as: "Using analytics to understand reach, engagement and conversion of your online audiences (2022) by Trish Thomas supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 4.0