Increasing the membership of your society starts with building relationships with potential members. While societies have traditionally relied on in-person meetings and events, more societies are leaning heavily on the internet through social media and their websites. A great tool for learning more about your website visitors is Google Analytics, the most widely used tool for tracking web visitors.
After you build your website, you’ll need to set up a Google “Tracking ID” that imbeds a code on each of your web pages. This alerts Google Analytics every time you receive a “hit” from a website visitor and compiles accessible information.
After a week or so of collecting data, you can start reviewing the results. For example, the Audience Overview will report the number of “Users” who have has visited your site and “New Users” who have visited your site for the first time. “Sessions” is the number of times these users have actively used your site and “Pageviews” are the number of web pages they have viewed.
On the Acquisition Overview, will provide you with insight into how your visitors find you. This includes from an “organic search” (e.g., through a search engine such as Google), from a direct link from another website; connections from social media sites, and “referrals” that are automatically forwarded from another location without being passed by the user’s web browser, such as from a PDF or MS Word document.
To find out what web pages your visitors are viewing, you can see the Behavior Overview. The default includes the top ten pages by pageviews but you can see all the results by clicking “view full report.”
For more detailed information and suggestions for using this information, Organizational Members can see the complete article in “Member Services” here: https://www.cosca.scot/google-analytics