Year end reporting

 

I spent the entire day gathering facts, figures and screen shots for the 2017 Annual Report.  It’s usually spring before it’s done because of the finance section, but I think I’ve gotten my part closer to done, earlier in the year than ever before.   Deep sigh...

 

Some of the things I learned about last year are really distressing.  This email to Howie was hard to send, because I am embarrassed at how poorly I did with the Facebook and Amazon ads:

 

I spent most of the day going over ad spend in both Amazon and Facebook and comparing that to online sales in Shopify.

 

Amazon only lets me go back 60 days, so I made a note to check every month and save it.  The figures below don't include anything I spent on Amazon ads before Nov. 1, but I don't think it was much, as I was just starting to dabble in it.

 

The Facebook one isn't exactly on point because a lot of the ad spend was for things like voting contests, or to promote a message, but I didn't try to sort it because sometimes those ads actually resulted in sales too.

 

Over all in both FB and Amazon I lost money running ads ($81,891.65 spent)  vs profit.  Gross sales were $113,566.49  According to Shopify there was only a 2% increase in online sales this year despite all the ads.

 

For now, I've cut the ad spend in both locations in half, but will reduce it further once I have time to drill down further into those campaigns, to see if there are any worth keeping.

 

Then there was my letter to Ysabel, asking how it could possibly be that our web site is dropping in visitors and ranking:

 

It looks like our website visits are VERY low, but I can't tell which of these sites is really BigCatRescue.org

 

We have always had more than 3.5 million visitors a year and this does not reflect that:

 

Can you tell me how many visitors we had in 2017 and separately how many in 2016?

 

Ysabel’s answer was even more unsettling:

 

Hi Carole,

 

It took me a while to retrieve the data, but after summarizing analytics reports, we had 2.12 million users in 2016 and 220,000 total users recorded for 2017. In 2017, we had numerous problems with SSL and a lot of user activity were most likely not tracked properly. I only started refining user tracking via secured version of our site last October, and from October to December we got 180,000 users.

 

In every other aspect the sanctuary has improved on last year.  More social engagement, more overall sales (both in the store and online), more media attention, more wins for cats around the world and for the first time since I began tracking such things in the 90s, there were no people mauled or killed by big cats in the U.S. last year.  All of the U.S. escapes were servals, one bobcat and one jaguar from a zoo.  Overall a great year; I’m just not accustomed to my own failures.

 

Later I looked into Flywheel’s backend (our host) to discover our website has had over 4 million visitors, so I told Ysabel there just has to be an issue with Google Analytic’s connection to the site.  This is what she reported:

 

Hi Carole,

 

Further digging and cross checking with our log files at Flywheel and I noted the following are the major reasons our google analytics figures were inconsistent with the raw data:

 

1- Sometime April when we were working on adding Tags to our calls to action (you hired a media company to promote the Public Safety Act), our theme files were slightly changed, specifically the analytics tracking code was removed from the header files. I had this flagged in my notes that time, with the comment that it must have been done because of redundancy with the Google Tag Manager. I forgot about this since. After having gone through my Analytics course, I know now that the Tag Manager only tracks the particular events it is attached to (such as whether people sign up or click the Call to Action button, or watch a video). When I was double checking our files and saw this inconsistency, I added the tracking code to the he