Web and social media metrics are crucial for gauging how well you're reaching your community. The catch is, metrics tools generally were not designed with community publishers in mind. On April 24, a free KDMC webinar will show how community publishers can use two popular metrics tools to serve their unique goals.

In Social and Web Metrics for Community Publishers, Rich Gordon (Director of Digital Innovation, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University) will help community publishers devise a simple metrics strategyfor actionable insights. Specifically, he'll explore the parts of Google Analytics and Facebook Insights that are especially helpful to community publishers. He'll also show why some popular metrics (such as page views) can be less useful or even misleading.

REGISTER NOW: April 24, 2014, 11am-noon PT

"Many community publishers have not focused on metrics as much as they could, but that's understandable," said Gordon. "They're usually small operations, and metrics often is not an apparent priority to them."

Efficiency is the key to using metrics well, said Gordon. And this is where it helps to understand who most metrics tools were really designed to serve. Sales and marketing are the primary use cases for Google Analytics and Facebook Insights -- so the presumptions and model of those tools are geared toward lead generation. But typically, direct sales is not what drives community publishers, even for ad-supported websites.

Community publishers only need to monitor a small set of metrics over time -- their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Tracking your KPIs over time tells you how well your online efforts are serving your goals. Gordon will cover the 10 or so metrics, out of the thousands available in these tools, that can serve as useful KPIs for community publishers.

From this perspective, one of the most useful KPIs in Google Analytics is pages/visit, a reasonable benchmark for online engagement with your website. He notes that Google Analytics also offers a popular metric called duration, but this is "worthless because of how G measures it," said Gordon. "To use metrics well, you should really understand what's being measured and how -- so I'll cover a bit of how the 'sausage' of metrics gets made."

Which KPIs a community publisher focuses on will be a moving target over time, as technology and usage trends change. For example, for the last 15 years unique visitors was a highly useful metric. However, in today's multiscreen media environment, a given user is apt to access your website via several devices (laptop, tablet, phone, etc.). "There's no longer any easy way to track unique web visitors, and I only see that getting worse over time. So there's not much point in tracking unique visitors anymore," said Gordon.

Monitoring KPIs can help community publishers identify helpful strategies to enhance those metrics. For instance, one way to boost pages/visit is to link, from any page in your site, to topically or thematically related content. A basic way to do this is to make use of the "categories" and "tags" features built into most content management systems, and to highly those in your web design. "Taking the time to assign consistent and meaningful categories and tags to your content -- ones that are intuitive to your community -- is really worth it in terms of increasing engagement," said Gordon.

Where is your traffic coming from? Monitoring inbound links from other websites and social media can help guide your community outreach efforts. This can also show you how much of your traffic is coming from search engines and specific social media services. Metrics tools also often offer some geographic insight into your audience.

Facebook Insights, used to measure traffic and usage of Facebook pages (as opposed to Facebook user accounts) offers two levels of information: a very cursory, high-level overview that you can view online; and a massive, detailed spreadsheet that you can download. And not much in between. Gordon will discuss how community publishers can strike a useful balance in this mix.

Looking ahead at the future of metrics, Gordon sees some potential for enabling collaboration between community publishers and similar projects or organizations. Some of the projects at Medill's Knight Lab (which develops prototypes, projects and services that help make information meaningful, with support from the Knight Foundation) are exploring this frontier.

"I think there's an interesting opportunity for any group of publishers who think they have something in common to aggregate data which they could then benchmark each other against. That doesn't exist right now -- but I have student team in Knight Lab working in that space."