Web Analytics 101

Madelyn Frascella: As a musician, you wouldn’t practice one concerto alone in your bedroom forever. You’d develop your skills, explore new techniques, and join fellow musicians shoulder to shoulder in the orchestra, moving classical music forward with every stroke of the bow. It’s the same with arts marketing and leadership. We don’t grow by staying in a bubble. We grow by learning together. That’s what Boot Camp 2024 is all about. This one of a kind conference brings arts professionals together to share fresh ideas, hone their skills, and fuel the future of our industry. A ticket to Boot Camp unlocks two full days of expert-led sessions and peer-driven insights, all 100% tailored to the arts and all 100% actionable when you return to your desk on Monday. It’s happening at the Times Center in New York City, October 24th and 25th, and it won’t be the same without you. Don’t miss this chance to level up your organization and join the creative community shaping the future of the arts. Save your seat at capacity interactive boot camp dot com.

Dan Titmuss: Hi everyone, and welcome back to CI to Eye. Today we’re tackling a common challenge for arts marketers: how to justify investing more time, money, and energy into website analytics. If you’re a data nerd like me, you already know the power of a solid analytics strategy. It gives you the insight you need to better understand your audiences, optimize your campaigns, and ultimately drive more ticket sales or donations. But let’s face it, sometimes it can feel like you’re speaking a different language when you try to explain this to leadership. The technical terms, the dashboards, the KPIs… it can all feel overly complicated to someone who isn’t in the digital trenches day in, day out. So how can you show your boss and board members that investing in analytics is not only worthwhile, but actually critical for long-term success? In today’s episode, I’ll sit down with Yosaif Cohain, CI’s VP of Analytics, to help you bridge the gap between the technical side of analytics and the high level goals that matter to your organization’s decision-makers. We are heading up into the clouds for a 10,000 foot view that will have your leadership team ready to double down on data. Ready, everyone? Up, up, and away!

Yosaif, thanks for being here.

Yosaif Cohain: Hey, Dan. Thanks for having me.

Dan Titmuss: So most of our listeners are probably familiar with you from the general CI world, but for those who aren’t, can you give us a bit of a background about how you ended up at Capacity?

Yosaif Cohain: Sure. I actually started my career outside the arts and was working at a design agency during a very transitional and transformational time in digital, right when companies were starting to realize that digital isn’t just a requirement, but it can truly be a competitive advantage and a differentiator and a driver of growth. We were doing this work for really big brands and I would say having a lot of fun doing it. We were the top agency that focused on the user experience and focusing on the user experience was actually pretty unique at the time. Other agencies were focused on innovation and shiny and pretty and winning awards, and our focus was usability. Our ethos was that the user is the number one stakeholder for the website and that the user experience must reflect that and must be elevated. So I had great years working there. There was something amazing for me about working with brands like IKEA or being part of a very small team that redesigned the CNN website.

The truth is that I kind of became a little bit addicted to it. I wouldn’t say that I had a passion, let’s say, for Pizza Hut as a product, but I got hooked to the puzzle and the challenge that we’re going to beat our competitors as an agency and that Pizza Hut will beat their competitors by being smarter and more strategic. It was this rush and it was incredibly rewarding. Eventually, we started getting clients that I had personal issues with and I knew I couldn’t stay there and feel proud of the work I was doing. And speak of timing, in the year that I was trying to figure out next steps and doing some freelance projects, I get an email from a former client, Erik Gensler, CI’s founder—

Dan Titmuss: Heard of him.

Yosaif Cohain: Yeah. Yes, we’ve heard of him. He and I had worked together when he was project managing the redesign for Ailey, and we met for coffee. We instantly meshed and gelled and we both knew we wanted to work together. And yeah, that was over 10 years ago and it’s been an amazing ride ever since.

Dan Titmuss: What’s the best part of working with arts and cultural clients at CI?

Yosaif Cohain: Obviously doing my small piece to help cultural institutions be more successful and by extension helping more people connect with art is something that is very special to me. More specifically, and to compare to my earlier days in the corporate side of things, I remember after being at CI for about six months and Erik telling me that I need to present at Boot Camp. And I go and I work on my presentation for about a week or so, and I show it to him. And I’ve done this dozens of times in my career, creating PowerPoints, but I blur out all the numbers and the client names. And I show this to Eric and he looks at me like I’m crazy, and he says to me—and this is when the light bulb moment, when the light switched for me—he says, “Do you think the Boston Ballet is competing with the Seattle Opera? The marketing director at the ballet went into this field because she loves art. Not only is she not competing with them, she wants to see them succeed and she wants to help.” And it was this small thing, but it was so beautiful and so meaningful to me and it’s something that I get to see over and over. So being part of this community of people that have a shared goal and want to uplift each other is very unique and it’s something that I deeply cherish.

Dan Titmuss: Yeah, that’s such a good point. Everyone is genuinely enthusiastic to help lift everyone else. I love that about this industry. So let’s talk about GA4. What is available right now and fairly accessible to people out of the box, as it were, and what requires more custom work to understand or implement?

Yosaif Cohain: Out of the box, you get a lot of data about traffic to the website and to specific pages. You’ll also get data on traffic sources and some other reports with a little customization. You can collect e-commerce data and you should be doing that with more work and intentionality. You can and you should track more behavioral data about how people are interacting with key parts of the site. Now, the challenge with all of this is that it’s still just reports and data. There’s so much data to make sense of, and no one has time for this. When I worked with corporations in my previous life, my counterparts were teams or even departments of analytics people. I think in my 10 years at CI, I can still count on one hand the number of organizations that I’ve worked with that have even one full-time person dedicated to web analytics. So this is the challenge and the opportunity and what we try to do to help our clients with analytics, is: given your more limited internal resources, how can we push through that and how can we still be great and get the most out of analytics?

Dan Titmuss: One of the first points you showed us, I remember when I first joined CI, was that your website touches everything. So if you can increase a Facebook ad by 20% performance, that’s great. If you can increase the amount of organic traffic going to your site by 5%, that’s great. If you even increase the website by just 1%, that touches every single channel.

Yosaif Cohain: Yes. If you improve your Facebook conversion rate by 10%, that’s awesome, and we should certainly be looking to make channel optimizations, but at the end of the day, if you look at your marketing mix, Facebook is going to be, what? 20% of your traffic? 30%? It’ll vary based on organization, but a 10% lift off of 20% of traffic is not going to be as big as making a 5% lift on the actual website that—like your landing page for example—that gets a lot of traffic, right? Like your newsletters are pulling there and organic search is pointing there and the Google grant and your Facebook stuff. So making optimizations around the user experience can actually have a trickle down effect. It’ll have an increase in your conversion rate for when you’re looking at data just in aggregate in your GA4, but then also when you look at your ROIs in your channels, that should have an impact there as well.

Dan Titmuss: What are the major mistakes, misunderstandings, or missed opportunities that you most often see when folks are coming to us with analytics questions for the first time?

Yosaif Cohain: I think that some organizations are getting it right as far as data collection, but I think the big opportunity is moving beyond that to data integration. Now that we have this awesome data, how do we incorporate it into our processes? Sometimes I worry that people think of analytics as a one-time checkbox to cross off the list when what you really should be signing up for is a changed approach where data becomes part of your process and culture. Instead of maybe coming to us and saying, here’s what we had in the past, can you fix it? Or is there an improved version of this thing we’ve been doing to instead really think bigger and ask how can analytics help us shift the way we do things? How can data transform our digital work?

Dan Titmuss: I can definitely understand that checkbox aspect to analytics. I work mostly with SEO as you know, and that can often be a sort of checkbox as well, whereas the real strength from these channels, which do require a little bit more [of an] in-the-weeds, technical look at our website, comes from over time, constantly updating, constantly making changes, having those incremental changes that I know especially for analytics are so important.

Yosaif Cohain: Yes, it’s not a one-time thing where you check a box and “we did SEO this quarter” or “we did analytics,” but we built the foundation and now we are leveraging it on an ongoing basis, and that can be at different rates and different paces, but the important thing is that it’s not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing thing that you’re buying into.

Dan Titmuss: It’s not that we did analytics, it’s that we do analytics.

Yosaif Cohain: Exactly.

Dan Titmuss: What do you find high level folks—talking like executive directors, board members—are most focused on when it comes to website analytics and what should they be focused on instead?

Yosaif Cohain: I think there’s still a focus on high level data and those numbers being big numbers. On seeing the trend that points up and to the right. On variance numbers being green instead of red. I’ve always been less focused on high level numbers, like total users or total page views. Instead, I’ve been focused on the user story and user engagement once people arrive at the website. The two types of questions that I would recommend focusing on instead: one, what are people doing when they come to the website? Are we meeting their needs? And then number two, how are we doing internally at integrating data into our team’s work? And both of these are processes that will take some time to get good at, but these are the questions that I think are far more interesting and important than the high level ‘how much traffic is the site getting’?

Dan Titmuss: I think a lot of the usability comes from being able to create a narrative from the data as well. To tell a story with the data so it’s not just a sort of wall of numbers. Do you think that can make it easier when talking to high level folks about analytics, people like executive directors, board members?

Yosaif Cohain: I think that’s such an interesting point, Dan, and it’s something that… I used to use this quote a lot, which is “The plural form of anecdote is data.” If we want to talk to someone and ask them, what was your experience when you went to the theater last night? They’re going to answer that to us in the form of a story. The challenge is how many of those people can we talk to? And once we get many of them, and that’s what the website and your analytics is, it’s thousands of sessions and thousands of people, then you are basically getting a lot of data points, which are a collection of various anecdotes, and that’s the job of an analyst is not to just report on numbers and to say, here’s how much traffic we got and here’s what the top 10 pages are. But to start framing it more around the user and the user story.

Dan Titmuss: Can you give us a couple of examples of analytics projects that you considered to be really successful?

Yosaif Cohain: Sure. The first is one of my favorite types of projects, and that’s a website redesign.

There’s so much excitement about redesigns and I have a passion for great websites and that’s what my background is in, but there’s something that no one talks about with redesigns and that’s that they contain a lot of unknowns and a lot of risk. What happens when you spend a year plus of your time and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a project that not only doesn’t move the needle up, it actually moves it down? The question is, how can we mitigate risk and how can we best set ourselves up for success? And the answer is by being as user-centric as possible in the process, and that’s going to mean being data-driven. So our part in this equation has been partnering with dozens of organizations heading into redesigns where we’re just looking to learn. We’re part of the discovery phase and we’re just trying to learn as much as we can about existing user behavior.

So we’re looking to answer questions like, how are people using the current site? And based on those results, trying to determine: how can we incorporate those behaviors and those learnings about user needs into the new website? It’s not me telling a designer ‘move this five pixels to the right’ or ‘make it a slightly different version of red,’ but it’s about ‘here’s what people are trying to do when they come to the website and here’s what they’re currently doing, and now you as a designer take this information and design a great solution based on that context.’

Dan Titmuss: Things like if people are always navigating towards one page and it’s five clicks away, like knowing that and knowing how important that page is, moving that to the front of the top nav for a website redesign. Is that the kind of things you’re talking about?

Yosaif Cohain: Exactly like that. So it’s about learning about existing behavior and then building solutions around that. And it’s funny you give that example. That’s one of the first examples that I got introduced to with web analytics. We were doing a redesign for JetBlue and we looked at the data and everyone was on the homepage and clicking on one thing every single time, and that was, “I want to book a flight.” And the simple solution was, let’s move the little mini booker, let’s create a mini booker and move that to the homepage. And it’s such an obvious no-duh kind of thing, but literally JetBlue was the first airline to do that. It’s become ubiquitous. Every single airline, every single car rental, every single hotel has a mini booker on the homepage because that’s what users want. Someone had to be the first. And that happened to be us with JetBlue. And that was purely based on looking at behavioral data and trying to say, how can I save the user even just one click, and that was the solution.

Dan Titmuss: What goes into a particularly meaningful analytics partnership? [With] all of your experience of working with hundreds of clients over the last few years, when does that partnership really excel?

Yosaif Cohain: I think like most things, the key is communication. One of the things that I’ve worked very hard on throughout my career is using data to invite people in. I try to convey excitement at what’s possible, and I like to show how to make things happen. I want to get rid of this concept of analytics being this quote “black box” that only people who specialize in it can access. I think on the receiving end, for us as consultants, I think that we provide the most value and we do the best work when we’re able to hear directly from our clients and our stakeholders about their goals and challenges, about their learning styles and preferences, about their workloads and priorities. That’s when it helps us have a great partnership. I never want analytics to feel like an awful chore. I want it to represent information that you get to access. I want to help generate that thirst and show you the tools of how to get there. So the more context that we have around what’s going on outside of analytics, I think the better we can be at finding ways to help you incorporate that data into your work.

Dan Titmuss: Yeah. What does an executive director or board member need to understand about the importance of investing in strong data collection and the use of website analytics?

Yosaif Cohain: We don’t need to be web analysts to recognize how important the website is to our success. It’s obvious that if the website went away tomorrow, we’d be in trouble. We are reliant on the website as an organization. All of our marketing and advertising pushes people to the website. We sell most of our tickets online. We showcase our exhibitions and productions. We get people to make a purchase decision with the user experience that we control. So having a great website isn’t just a want, it’s an imperative. I think one of the most common and subconscious mistakes that we can make is that we assume people use the website the same way we do, so we don’t need to use data. We know about behavior, but we are far from the typical user. We’ve been to the website hundreds of times already. We know our organization inside out. We already have a deep knowledge and love for our art form. That is not the user that is quickly arriving at the website from a Facebook ad. That’s not someone who we’re hoping will be a first time attendee or tourist planning a trip to town or even a renewing subscriber. So we need to let go of this bias—it’s almost like a certain level of humility—and accept that the website is built for the people, and that’s why I keep saying we have to be user-centric.

Dan Titmuss: I feel like digital marketing changes every month or every week sometimes. So viewing it over 10 plus years, 20 years of seeing how websites have changed since then, it’s always really interesting. Whenever I talk to you, I’m always really inspired by how much of the world you’ve seen on the digital marketing side.

Yosaif Cohain: Thank you. It’s interesting how in many ways things do change very quickly, and then in many ways the underlying root and the principles stay exactly the same. What we do today is very similar to what we’ve been doing for years. I think that behind the scenes a lot has changed. The platforms—of course everyone’s heard about migration to the new GA4—but also I would say the way we go about collecting data, the richness of what we can collect, the accuracy of some of the data that we collect, increasingly the incorporation of machine learning into the data… But conceptually, web analytics today is the same as what it’s been for the past 10 and 15 years at its core. And really the simplest way to explain what it is is that it’s a tool that gives voice to your users. People are telling us about how they like our websites and how we’re meeting their needs, only they’re telling us with their clicks. They’re constantly voting just by the way they’re using it. So really, web analytics is a choice. Do we pay attention and listen and optimize or not? And that’s been a constant in the practice of web analytics and why I personally love doing this work because I want to understand what users want and I want to help solve for those user needs because I know, and I’ve seen, that this leads to better user experiences and to better results.

Dan Titmuss: If you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff, and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would that message be?

Yosaif Cohain: Well, first off, I just want to say thank you to everyone for the work you do and for taking the time to listen to me talk about data. I will continually advocate for investing in your website, investing in the data revolving around the website, and investing in your people and processes that revolve around the data. By doing so, you’re really investing both in your users and in your organization’s success. I think that being great at data and UX can seem very daunting, and maybe the perception is that it’s only for the Amazons and Netflixes and tech startups, and yes, there are going to be some advanced things that they do that we cannot, but there is so much opportunity in front of us, and with the proper focus and approach, it is certainly an achievable and I think very rewarding journey to take.

Dan Titmuss: Awesome. I’ll pass that on to all of those people. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Yosaif. It’s always an absolute pleasure to speak to you.

Yosaif Cohain: Thank you so much, Dan.

Dan Titmuss: All right, analytics aficionados. Before we say goodbye, here’s an extra dose of inspiration from arts organizations in the news. First up, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra was featured in the New York Times article, “What if orchestras were more like Netflix?” Their CEO, Christina Littlejohn, shared the positive impacts of their unique membership program saying, “Our halls look fuller and our orchestra is happier. It’s just been a game changer.” Kudos ASO! Next, the Charlotte Observer reported that Charlotte Ballet was awarded $5 million from the Knight Foundation for its facility expansion, which will include housing for artists-in-residence, new dance studios, and an outdoor event space. Incredible news, Charlotte Ballet. We’re so proud of these CI clients for expertly evolving along with their communities. Got a story that deserves a shout out? Well, tag us on social and let us know.

Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CI to Eye’s designers and video editors, and all work together to create CI’s digital content. Our music is by whoisuzo. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover CI to Eye and hear from experts in the arts and beyond. If you didn’t enjoy today’s episode, pass it on to all of your enemies. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for our newsletter at capacity interactive dot com so you never miss an update. And if you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, stay nerdy.