Add Slack integration

[mikedane]

One of the goals of the academy website is to get learners to join the bitovi community slack channel. Once on the channel, we'll have their email and have a direct way to communicating with them.

Currently the website has a link to the slack channel on the homepage and sidebar, but we don't have a way of tracking when this link get's used. The first step in fully integrating slack into bitovi academy will be to track which users are joining the slack from the academy page.

• [ ] Figure out a way to track which users join the community slack from the bitovi academy website.

In addition, it might be nice to have the slack channel integrated into the website in some way. Whether it shows the discussion around the current course/topic, or allows users to sign up right from the academy website.

My personal preference would be to have the slack room most closely related to the current course displayed on the sidebar, or below the lesson. This would make it more clear to the users where they can go for help, and reduce the time it takes them to get involved in the community.

• [ ] Embed the slack channel into bitovi academy website

[chasenlehara]

I’ve done some research related to this issue.

First, if we want to start tracking hits to bitovi.com/community/slack now, I think we should make that an HTML page (right now it’s just a redirect within HubSpot) that redirects to the signup link. That will help us track referrers. We should also add UTM params for different sources ( e.g. bitovi.com/community/slack?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social for links on YouTube), which would give us some more insights in Google Analytics.

That doesn’t help us track where any particular user came from though. I couldn’t find anything from Slack that would help with that. I think we’d have to create our own invite process. Maybe by using StackStorm or Google Forms/Sheets, or setting up a server like slack-invite-automation. I think one of these could be used to track exactly where any particular user comes from, although it would require the initial setup & inevitable maintenance.

TLDR: I think we should start tracking hits to the bitovi.com/community/slack page now, and if we care about tracking exactly where any particular user came from, we should explore our options.

[chasenlehara]

I’ve changed the bitovi.com/community/slack page from an HTTP redirect to a page with an HTML redirect. I’m waiting to see in Google Analytics whether everything’s being tracked correctly (I already confirmed the GA script is on the page).

[chasenlehara]

It looks like Google Analytics is tracking that page correctly: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#/report/content-pages/a2302003w57016376p58145341/explorer-table.plotKeys=%5B%5D&explorer-table.secSegmentId=analytics.sourceMedium&_r.drilldown=analytics.pagePath:~2Fcommunity~2Fslack&explorer-segmentExplorer.segmentId=analytics.source/

So now we can see referrers to that link. That gives us a little more info on where people are coming from, but not a direct relationship between a referrer and a specific person who signs up. I think this is an acceptable start.