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Want to Make Your Website Soar? Learn to Read Analytics

This Tyee Master Class will help you make sense of all that data. May 9, enrol now.

Tyee Staff 4 May 2015TheTyee.ca

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Eric Squair: 'You wouldn't get into a car without a windshield you can't see through. Why put time and money into online work without some way to course correct?'

In an era when every organization must pay attention to its online presence, consultant Eric Squair provides crucial literacy tools to ensure your website runs efficiently.

"Online communications are too important to leave to gut instincts and blindly pursuing the latest shiny object," says Squair. He has worked in web communications for more than 12 years, mainly for large non-profit organizations, but also with independent businesses who want to leverage the web.

Squair began his career at Greenpeace in 2001. It was a time of rapid growth in web technology and it seemed there were all kinds of opportunities to increase Greenpeace's online presence. But Squair said the group had no way of knowing "what was really working and what wasn't." When Google Analytics was introduced in 2005, he found it "incredibly valuable" in helping to create a framework for evaluating and improving online work.

The web and online communications have since evolved. But organizations still need to make decisions based on results, not hunches or misleading numbers.

"I am not sure this has got any easier in the last decade, as web analytics have become more sophisticated and in some ways harder to interpret," Squair says. "My aim is to give the organizations I work with a clear and intuitive framework for making decisions based on web analytics data."

On Saturday, May 9, Squair will host a Master Class on how to assess your online work and evaluate the results of your web, social media, email, online advertising and content marketing.

The class takes place in The Tyee's beautiful new classroom in downtown Vancouver and the $200 registration fee includes coffee, lunch and a bit of B.C. beer.

We asked Squair about his online background, and what class participants can expect to learn.

The Tyee: Why should people track analytics on their website?

Eric Squair: You wouldn't get in a car with a windshield you can't see through. Why put time and money into online work without some way to course correct?

What is the one thing you want class participants to walk away with after your class?

A framework for evaluating their online efforts so they do more of what's working and stop wasting time and money on what's not working.

What is one quick tip you can offer to people about measuring their online work?

The quality of the insights you get is based on the questions you ask about your online work. How is Facebook working out for us? What value does our blog bring our organization? Should we send more emails or focus more on Twitter? Start with questions that will help you have greater impact online, start collecting the relevant data, then use that data to answer them over time. And be patient, grasshopper.

How has the field changed over time?

The tools are much more sophisticated. When I started, the only data available to "webmasters" (that was a thing) was server logs: a raw firehose of data on how your website was being used, and by whom. We used a tool called Webalizer to interpret the logs. It had to be sifted through for any kind of insights, and it was a painful process.

Nevertheless, people were fascinated by any data we could give them on visits, popular content and what was "going viral." The smart, strategic folks wanted more and better numbers with which to make decisions. Google Analytics -- previously an expensive tool for web analytics -- was launched as a free service in 2005 and opened peoples' eyes to the quality and type of data they could expect to receive.

Ready to learn more? Enrol in the Tyee Master Class now.

Registration is limited. To learn more about this Tyee Master Class and others, go here.  [Tyee]

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