Fienen's Totally Topical, Terrific Tutorial to Tag Manager (AIM3)

Google Analytics is an everyday part of most people's lives now in the web world. And it's just one of many third-party tools you might be using to manage your website. However, with large sites and disparate groups, it's common place to do little more beyond implementing basic tracking. It turns out, Tag Manager can vastly simplify how you enable people to track their websites without needing to intervene with extra coding, as well as enabling additional tools, features, and embeds for a site. Everything from analytics to live chat, from form tracking to social media conversions can all be tied together with this simple tool - all without adding any extra code to your side (besides the Tag Manager code, obviously). Let's make your life a little bit easier, and a lot cooler, by digging into Google complementary tool, Tag Manager, and look at ways you can streamline your site tracking process (and much, much more). We'll look at some real-world use cases, and maybe take some audience questions to do live demos, because that's just how we do, right?

From Strategic Plan to Content Strategy (MCS4)

Content strategy is good for business, but it can be challenging to sell the fundamentals of content strategy to leaders and decision-makers in our organizations. It can also be challenging to stay focused on strategy when faced with multiple audiences, politicized home page real estate, conflicting priorities, and demands on web resources. In this session, we’ll discuss the value of your organization’s strategic plan in the face of these challenges—examining its application for making a case, guiding content and design decisions, and evaluating the success of your efforts.

Beyond SEO: Writing Findable Content (MCS5)

"I can't find it." Yep, I hear that one too. In fact, it's the most common complaint I hear from students, faculty, and staff about their university website. I also hear them ask: "Where am I?" "Is this for me?" "Where do I go from here?" These questions are symptoms of poor findability—and we need to answer them. No page on our website should feel like a dead end. Institutions that take action often responded to these problems with a redesigned website or new information architecture, but what about the content we create? Beyond SEO, how can we effectively guide web users toward their destination—as well as enable their discovery of useful, relevant content? It starts with a content strategy and continues by educating content contributors about findability and navigation.

You Get What You Pay For: Make Facebook Advertising Work for You (AIM11)

We've all spent countless hours and months -- for many of us, years -- growing our Facebook page likes and optimizing our content and calendars. Yet each year our organic reach shrinks, and our carefully crafted posts reach a smaller percentage of our fans. The reason for this is obvious: Facebook wants us to pay. The good news is, with even a small budget, you can make use of Facebook's robust, detailed, and, at times, creepy knowledge of their consumers, and spend your money and your energy reaching your target audiences. This session will focus on the backend of Facebook's native advertising tools, covering Facebook Power Editor, advanced keyword and geo-targeting, email match, remarketing, conversion tracking, Google Analytics integration, and more. We'll also touch on Instagram advertising, as it relates to Facebook, and touch on Twitter and LinkedIn as a bonus if time allows. Bring your laptops, your questions, and any of your own experiences with Facebook advertising to share–together we'll cut through the noise and get our content back in front of the people who care about it!

A Day in the Life of an Analyst (MPD12)

Aaron Baker, Digital Analytics Lead for Harvard University Public Affairs & Communications, will walk through his editorial calendar for analytics reports, touching on everything from how Google Analytics and Tag Manager work together to how that data should be interpreted and reported to managers and executives. Aaron will also talk about the process he used to build a data landscape for Harvard.edu and the Gazette news website, investigating and integrating multiple data sources for combined analytic data on email, social, and web. You will learn how to map out your own data landscape of what data you have, where it comes from, where it resides now, and what your access is to it. You will learn how to pick which KPIs you should keep track of and what metrics you should use to report to your leadership.