Tracking and reporting on activity in your Online Contact Center database and site is an important function. The numbers help you to understand where (by school) and how your system is helping engage your local community. The same data can be useful in identifying the need for staff training or other interventions in the future.
Reporting on Users & Subscribers
Users have an account within your database and it can be useful to track how many new users are added each month or school year. If you use the Newsgroups Module you may also want to track the subscribers to those newsgroups.
Current & New Users
To calculate the number of users who were added to your database over a given school year or month of the year, follow these steps -
- Go to Users > Search
- Under the ‘Date Registered’ section type the Start Date for when you want to begin counting new users and the End Date for when you want to stop counting
- Press the SEARCH button at the bottom of the page.
This will display a user list with the count in the DISPLAYED field, just above the list. You may want to run this search twice, once to get the numbers up to a specific date, for example start of school in the current school year, and then monthly thereafter.
User Sign-in
Sometimes it can be useful to know if users are signing in to their accounts. For example, if you ask them to sign-in to update information and need to determine how many actually followed your instructions.
This is a similar process to reporting Current Users. You will be using the ‘Last Login Date’ section, rather than ‘Register Date’ to run this report.
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Go to Users > Search
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Under the ‘Last Login Date’ section type the Start Date for when you want to begin counting users and the End Date for when you want to stop counting.
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Press the SEARCH button at the bottom of the page
Newsgroup Subscribers
There are several methods to get the count of current subscribers to your various newsgroups. You can open the Groups Module and view the list of newsgroups. This page contains the count of subscribers for each newsgroup option. You can click the count to see the list of subscribers.
You can go to Users > Search and choose the newsgroup you’re interested in and the filtered results will show the list of subscribers to the selected group.
If you want a count of subscribers by month then you will need to go to Reports > Groups. This will display a page with all your newsgroup options. Follow these steps to generate your report.
- Highlight the newsgroups you want to report on, and click the ADD button to move them to the Selected Items list.
- Specify the date range by typing a Start and End date of when you want to count subscribers.
- Choose the ‘Group Summary’ report option
- Select the ‘Generate CSV Export File’ option to download your report
School Publishing Activity
If your schools are sending notices and newsletters out with your Online Contact Center, or if you have multiple publishers in your central office and want to track the number of messages being sent, then you will want to use the Interfaces report. To generate the report you need follow these steps -
- Go to Reports > Interfaces
- Choose from the Available Interfaces the ones that you want to report and Add them to the Selected Interfaces list
- Select ‘Publishing Results’ as the Report Title
- Type the Start and End dates for the date range you want to report
- Choose the ‘Generate CSV Export File’ to download an Excel file
If you school district only uses our EZCommunicator/Basic version (as opposed to our Enterprise version), you will see only one interface under the Available Interfaces list. This is your district interface and you need to select.
Other Numbers To Consider
There are several other places in your Online Contact Center where you can track online engagement with your users. While not all result in a report like the ones listed above, they can be useful in understanding how your audience is interacting with your Online Contact Center content.
Email Opens & Inactivate
In one of our early 2016 releases we added a new statistic to your notices and newsletter email count results. For any notice you have published if you click on the Email number, which is the count of emails that were queued and sent, you will see a number and percentage for Emails Opened and for Inactivate Link.
The Emails Opened number is showing the users who opened your notice or newsletter, while the Inactivate Link number shows the users who clicked in the Inactivate My Account link in the footer of your email and will no longer be sent your emails.
Emails Opened only counts users is they allow the display of images when viewing your message. This is because the standard for counting email opens is to include a single-pixel image in the email sent to a user and count as opened any user who downloads that image. If they just read the subject line or do not allow the display (download) of images they may read your message but won’t be included in the Email Opened count.
Website and Social Media Engagement
Because your online contact center can be configured to post notices and newsletters to Facebook and Twitter, it raises the question of how many users are reading your messages from those social media networks. You can also place your notice on your Archive page and would be useful to know the users that view that archived message.
To track social engagement with your posted and/or archived notices and newsletters you need to integrate web analytics with your contact center site.
In addition to the social media setup through your Configuration Module, you can include a Google Analytics script to track website views of various pages. Start by setting up your tracking ID for Google Analytics to include a unique ID for your contact center site. This will help separate results from your district or school website.
Include the Google Analytics tracking ID in your Configuration > General Settings and you will begin tracking users who come to your Online Contact Center site to login, view your archives, or access any other page.
By default we include a link in the social media posts that are sent to Facebook and Twitter so if a follower clicks on that link you will get a count through Google Analytics and can determine where they were ‘referred’ from when they came to your site.