5 Digital Metrics City Managers Should Know
As a city manager, knowing your agency’s digital metrics can inform the decisions made at city hall. Tapping into these resources on your website, social media and email system offer insights that will point you in the right direction to create a digital footprint that your community will want to follow.
These insights can be discovered in five key metrics every city manager should know to take their agency’s customer service to the next level.
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Website Impact
When using a website to execute outreach and transparency initiatives, it is important to know a) if your content is being seen by anyone and b) if those viewing your content are a part of your intended audience. To figure this out, add Google Analytics on your website and review the geographic source of each visit to your website. The data will show you where site visitors are located and inform you if you need to adjust outreach efforts to garner more engagement.
Metrics To Review: Total Residential Visitors Each Month and Compare Month-to-Month
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Social Media
You should know who your agency’s social media followers are and what posts they’re engaging with. Social media tools on Facebook, Google, Twitter and even Nextdoor can provide insight on who your residents are and what topics and issues interest them most. Additionally, Facebook Insights can identify the approximate number of residents versus non-residents engaging online with your city as well as provide a host of details about their gender, age, occupation and more. If you review this data, you will know who is engaging with you on social media and what they’re engaging with to better inform what you post about and the impact you are having.
Metrics To Review: Total Residential Who Follow the Agency Online, Total Audience Reached Each Month, Total Postings Each Month
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Website Content
After measuring who is looking at your website, it is time to see review which content is most popular. Knowing your most-visited pages not only allows you to spot trends, but to restructure your website to prioritize certain matters that the city has determined are critical for the community to learn about. Google Analytics can easily provide all these details in monthly reports.
Metric to Review: Top 15 Most Visited Pages; Compare Month-to-Month
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Resident “HAM” List
Email is a powerful tool and remains a “killer app” for the Internet. The ability to cost-effectively deliver news directly into the inbox of a resident, local business/worker or a potential city visitor is a powerful distribution platform. Indeed, we argue at Tripepi Smith it is the most powerful tool. But you need to know how many people your email list is actually reaching and what that is as a percentage of your overall population. Email distribution systems should track opt-out rates, bounces and click-through rates. Most importantly, focus on how many legitimate emails you have in the system and how many emails you are adding each month.
Metric to Review: Total Email Subscribers, Email Subscribers as a Percentage of Your Population
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Nielsen “demo” stats
Producing videos can take up a lot of time and manpower. Keeping this in mind, don’t you want to know if anybody is actually watching your online videos? Knowing which videos are gaining the most traction can help you understand your community’s concerns. You will also be able to see if there is a staff report or particularly public hearing video that is getting abnormal attention. To track these metrics, you must have a video hosting tool like those offered by Granicus or YouTube in place. However, the YouTube metrics appear to be far more accurate.
Metric to Review: Top Five Videos by Views in Last 30 Days
As a busy city executive, adding another report to the roster each month may seem daunting, but it is important for you to understand the impact your outreach efforts are having. Do you have the capacity to quickly connect with residents? Will your reach keep up with the local active community Facebook Group?
Tripepi Smith stands ready to help you find, track and understand your digital analytics. Our team members are seasoned and/or certified with Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Nextdoor, Constant Contact, GovDelivery and Vision. Inquire about how we can help today.