It was clear from the start of our engagement with Soldiers’ Angels that they knew how to effectively connect and draw in new members to their social media networks. In fact, Shelle Michaels, a full-time volunteer and National Communication Director, has vowed to reach 75,000 Facebook Fans by Christmas, and has already increased membership on the Soldiers’ Angels Fan Page by 450% to nearly 40,000 since January 1st.

What we found was that even though they had an amazing team and passionate supporters, it was difficult to quantify the value of social media versus other online and offline efforts. Without a way to tie actions to results, Soldiers’ Angels was only able to prove value anecdotally. In addition, there was also no way to measure the effectiveness of concurrent campaigns or types of messaging.


Why Should You Read This Post?
What we would like to do with this post is to explain some key concepts of the reporting strategy that we implemented for Soldiers’ Angels so that other organizations might be able to learn and adopt methods to better measure their success and constantly improve their online initiatives. If you find that you have further questions about how to implement these strategies, please feel free to leave a comment below. We’d be happy to start a discussion and aid you in your process.

Soldiers’ Angels Background & Goals
Soldiers’ Angels is a volunteer-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing aid and comfort to the men and women of the United States Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and their families. Its hundreds of thousands of Angel volunteers assist veterans, wounded and deployed personnel and their families in a variety of unique and effective ways.

Its volunteers have sent hundreds of thousands of care packages and letters to deployed service members; they have supplied the wounded with First Response Packs directly at the Combat Support Hospitals, as well as provided care and comfort to those in stateside military and VA facilities; they have provided emergency aid to military families in need; they have partnered with the Department of Defense to provide voice-controlled/adaptive laptops to nearly 3,000 severely-wounded servicemembers, as well as other technology that supports rehabilitation; they have provided flights to soldiers on leave or in emergency situations, and to their families wanting to be with them upon return from overseas; they have provided Level III KEVLAR armored blankets to give personnel extra protection in their vehicles when it was needed; they help to honor and uphold the families whose loved ones have paid the ultimate price for our freedom and safety.

To accomplish these amazing tasks and so much more, Soldiers’ Angels depends on the generosity of its supporters. They need both manpower and revenue to see that these important activities continue. Therefore, two of their most important goals for their online initiatives are to recruit new Angels and to collect donations that allow them to provide service members with the care that they most desperately need.

Once we had identified these key goals, we decided to utilize their existing Google Analytics account to measure them and other important metrics. One of the greatest attributes of this solution is the fact that it is completely free. It’s also arguably superior to paid solutions in some ways.

To learn how to set up Google Analytics for your Web site, I recommend that you watch the brief lessons at Google’s Conversion University.

Sorting Traffic
The first step was to properly identify and sort traffic that was being referred to the SoldiersAngels.org Web site. Without knowing where traffic is coming from, or what drives visitors to the site, it is impossible to draw meaningful conclusions for optimization of online efforts.

By default, referring sites are already tracked within Google Analytics, but this doesn’t necessarily capture the full story. For instance, more than 50% of tweets are posted from applications, and are likely clicked using the same tools. Therefore, the number of visits reported from twitter.com represent less than half of the actual traffic from that platform.

Syndication of social content across the Web further complicates the issue. As you can see, social media can be severely under-reported without appropriate action. And additionally, there is no way to tell what messaging or campaign drew the user to visit the Web site.

Campaign Tagging
The problems above are fixed through the use of campaign tagging. By appending tracking parameters to the end of a URL, Google Analytics is given instruction on exactly how to report each visit. This lengthens the original URL, but any link shortening service can fix that. You’re probably already using one for your Tweets and Facebook posts.

This process ensures that the proper source and campaign are reported, no matter where the link travels through social media channels, or even via email. We helped Soldiers’ Angels identify the channels under their control, where they should append tracking code to links that point to their Web site. We also set a framework to ensure consistent tagging using Google Docs as a central resource for all team members to update this evolving resource. You can learn more about campaign tagging from Google, here.

Below is an example of what a campaign-tagged link looks like, before it’s shortened. Notice the three “utm_source=, utm_medium= and utm_campaign=” parameters following the question mark that starts the query. The values that follow each are what will be reported to Google Analytics if you were to click on that link.

http://soldiersangels.org/?utm_source=communicause.com&utm_medium=social
&utm_campaign=analytics-post

This might look difficult to create, but the Google URL Builder Tool makes it very easy.

Classifying Social Traffic
The next step we took was to apply a custom filter to their Google Analytics account to identify all traffic from common social media channels and reclassify their medium from referral to “social”. This allows the team to easily segment their reports to see just how big of a piece of the (online) pie social channels are responsible for. If you are interested in applying the same strategy, see below for some filter settings to start with, and watch this brief presentation for instructions on how to implement them.

And below is the start of a regular expression that can be customized to identify your important social channels. You can learn more about how to use regular expressions in a great eBook provided by LunaMetrics here.

(facebook|twitter|myspace|answers.yahoo|blogspot|wordpress|squidoo|flickr|causes|linkedin|
livejournal|hootsuite|blogger|delicious|digg|reddit|ning|typepad|tumblr)\.com|forum|community
|blog|board|ow.ly|ustream.tv

Measuring Exits to Social Media
We not only wanted to measure inbound traffic from social media, but also see how willing Web site visitors were to engage Soldiers’ Angels via social networks, and whether these visitors were an inherently more valuable group, in terms of engagement, goal completions and donations. To do so, we fashioned a simple widget to feature prominently on their site that advertised their social platforms.

We coded Events to be reported to Google Analytics whenever a visitor clicked to visit one of their social platforms. This allows the Soldiers’ Angels team to not only see how many visitors are leaving to engage on these networks, but also to be able to segment these users and measure their value using a custom report (which will be discussed further below). To learn more about coding events and virtual pageviews from Conversion University, click here.

Tracking Donations & Goals
Next, we applied eCommerce tracking to all online donation sources and aggregated them to report into one account. You can learn how to enable eCommerce tracking and implement the necessary code in this presentation from Google’s Conversion University. This allowed us to not only measure referrals from social sites, but also their monetary value in full and in comparison to other sources.

eCommerce tracking was able to capture most transactions related to social media, but few were unable to be automatically captured. These included offline donations attributed to social campaigns and donations through Facebook’s Causes application. Toward the goal of complete measurement, we fashioned a tool that allowed Soldiers’ Angels to report these donations manually into a normally-closed Google Analytics platform, along with the attributed source, medium and campaign for accurate tracking.

We then identified all on-site goals, including joining to become a volunteer Angel, submission and adoption of soldiers, signing up for Soldiers’ Angels newsletters and other tasks that show the willingness to help and assigned them to measured as Goals in Google Analytics. This allows the Soldiers’ Angels team to not only track their conversion rate, but also examine the funnel to optimize their on-site conversion processes. They could also track what initiatives were most effective to draw people toward these actions. More about the use of Goals and Funnels can be found here on Conversion University.

Custom Reporting & Training
With this new wealth of data, we did our best to ensure that the Soldiers’ Angels team wouldn’t get lost in the sea of metrics by fashioning a custom dashboard, as well as a number of custom reports. These reports focused on their specific goals and the methods by which their visitors find their site and meet those goals. The earlier re-classification of appropriate content as “social” allows the team to easily drill down and compare the effectiveness of this medium versus print, press releases, email marketing and other traffic sources. Below, you see the drag and drop interface used to create tailored custom reports.

This also allows the right data to be shared among the organization efficiently, through the use of automatic and on-demand email reports. Custom Google Intelligence Alerts also allow the Soldiers’ Angels team to be notified when goals are met or an influx of visitors come to the site and help them figure out what causes these successes - hopefully to be repeated. Learn more about how to use Google Analytics Intelligence on YouTube.

This phase of our project was wrapped up with a comprehensive training and Q&A session with their key team members. We also provided in-depth custom documentation to ensure that any future team members could be brought up to speed quickly.

Final Thoughts
Soldiers’ Angels, a volunteer-led non-profit organization, now has a more robust tracking system than a large number of online brands. With a little work, your organization can as well. Through the enhanced effectiveness of online campaigns, driven by 360 degree view of your initiatives on the Web, time spent tracking is almost guaranteed to show a significant return.

We’re excited to watch Soldiers’ Angels online footprint continue to grow as well as the breadth of services that they offer to our armed forces. Why not follow them on Twitter or join the Soldiers’ Angels Facebook Fan Page to help Shelle reach her goal and share their mission with your friends and associates?

Watch out for additional enhancements that we’ll be rolling out soon across their most popular platforms. And in the meantime, please leave any thoughts or questions that you have for us below.

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