Introduction to google analytics

Computers in Libraries 2012

Introduction to Google Analytics

Jeff WisniewskiUniversity of Pittsburgh

Darlene FichterUniversity of SaskatchewanGA team’s cake

By the end of this session

Have an analytics account

Have tracking code to add to your site

Understand basic web metrics

Understand the GA dashboard and other reports

Create goals and funnels

Create custom reports to track mobile and social media

Learn how to export, mail and schedule reports

Write down two specific things about your website you hope GA will help you to better understand/answer

Introductions

Housekeeping

Mandatory Wikipedia Definition

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage

Reasons to measure?

Usability

Resource

Institutional

Other?

We can learn…

Who is coming to our site

What they’re doing

How long they stay

The systems they’re using to access our site

If they’re able to complete tasks

How they find us

Two flavors

Log file analysis

Page tagging

Log files…

Are big

Take a long time to ingest

Take a lot of computing power to process

Take up space

Require that you be able to access them

Do you have experience with another analytics tool? Which? Pros and cons?

Photo by mcw026 cc some rights reserved

Why GA?

Industry standard

Lots of folks use it

Easy to use

Web based

Visual

Google account

If you do not have a Google account please register for one now

Google.com/accounts

Getting Started

1. Google account

2. Website

3. Access to website code

GA Account

Log into

Google.com/analytics

Let’s GO!

General Info

Site URL

Account name

Time zone info

Contact info

(Please take two hours and carefully review the end user license agreement before clicking through)

Add tracking

The tracking code can be “included” as part of your page template

Photo by BigTallGuy cc some rights reserved

Create TWO profiles for your site, one the “master” profile and the second the “working” profile

Photo by Stéfan, Some rights reserved

You can create multiple profiles for the same site, for example different subsections, to speed reporting

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The GA interface

Menu translation

Menu item English translation

Dashboard General overview of site activity

Intelligence Email and/or text alerts

Visitors How man people, where they come from, what systems they’re using

Traffic Sources How people are getting to and/or finding your site

Content What do people look at on your site

The Dashboard

Provides an overview of site activity

Many of the metrics here appear elsewhere in GA as well

Key metrics

METRIC DEFINITION NOTE

Bounce rate % of visits that immediately left

High bounce rate can be good or bad

Goal Page someone reaches once they’ve completed some task

Hit Request for a file from a webserver

Artifically inflated

Pageview Display of a complete webpage

Visits Series of pageviews from same visitor

Within 30 minutes

Dashboard

You can customize the dashboard…just click

to add a panel or click the “X” in the right hand corner to remove from dashboard

Intelligence

Alerts

Can be applied to most any event/metric

Email and/or txt message

When you first begin collecting data, or change/add, set an alert for verification that it’s working as expected

Visitors

Some Visitors section info repeated in Dashboard

Benchmarking?

New vs. returning, unique visitors, visitor loyalty all rely on cookie data. Caveats:

Browser specific They expire They can be blocked or deleted Public computers

Rule of thumb

TRENDS in the data are more important than the numbers themselves

Visitors

Photo reserved by Scott Clark Some rights

Visitors

Visitor technical information OS Browser Screen color & resolution Flash Java Network properties

Connection speed Mobile

Visitors: Browser

Visitors: Mobile

Benchmarking?

Visitors

Google analytics can also track mobile APP (android and iOS) usage: http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/

Traffic Sources

An overview of the different sources that send traffic to your site Direct Referring Search engines

Photo by lambchops Some rights reserved

Traffic Sources

Direct Access via a bookmark or type in URL directly

Referring Click to your site from another site

Search engines Click to your site from search engine results

Traffic Sources

Keywords:

Terms used to “find” your site via search engines

Traffic Sources: Referrers

Most tables in GA can be searched to find a

specific entry

Traffic Sources

Content

Content: Top Content

Content: In page analytics

Content

A “goal” is the page which a visitor reaches once they have completed a desired action, such as a registration or download.

A “funnel” is the pages they need to visit on the way to a goal.

EXAMPLE: Library legislative history course sign up

Goals: Setting up goals and funnels

1. Name the goal something intuitive. In this example it might be “Class Registration”

2. Choose whether or you want the goal to be active (on) now

3. Choose a type of goal. Most library scenario goals will probably fall under the “URL Destination” type, meaning the goal is to get the user to a specific place, in this case the “thank you for registering” page.

4. Enter the URL for this goal page

5. Under “Goal Funnel” click yes

6. On the following page add the URL(s) of the page(s) along the path a user would take to get from the homepage all the way through to the thank you page.

Exact match has to be EXACTLY the same as the URL….even leading or trailing spaces will cause it to fail

Exercise

Visit your library website. Fully define two (or more!) goals.

GOAL NAME GOAL URL FUNNEL

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Advanced segments

Let you group certain types of visits together

User defined

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments Examples

iPad users visiting your events calendar

How much traffic is coming from Facebook? Twitter? Both?

How many site visitors connect using dialup?

Advanced Segments Notes

In some cases GA will suggest variables (operating system for ex.)

Advanced segments take AND & OR statements

Advanced segment: Mobile

To see all mobile traffic aggregated:

1. Click on the Advanced Segments > Create a new custom segment

2. Under Dimensions click on Visitors

3. Drag the green Mobile rectangle into the dimension or metrics box.

4. Make sure the Condition equals “Matches Exactly” and the Value equals Yes

5. Name the segment and save

Advanced segment: Specific mobile

To see data for one or more specific mobile platforms:

1. Click on the Advanced Segments > Create a new custom segment

2. Under Dimensions go to Systems > Operating Systems

3. Drag the green Operating Systems rectangle into the dimension or metrics box.

4. Make sure the Condition equals Matches Exactly

5. Choose a mobile OS from the dropdown

Advanced segment: Social media

1. Go to Advanced Segments > Create New Custom Segment

2. Choose Dimensions>Traffic Source>Source and drag to the main panel

3. Under matches choose Matches regular expression and enter something like this (including the pipes): facebook.com|twitter.com|delicious|linkedin|

(Customize for the specific sources you’d like to track)

Each social media source can also have it’s own segment so that you can track individually

Advanced segments

Useful: Date comparisons

Photo by TheBusyBrain Some rights reserved

Comparisons

1. Choose first date range

2. Click “compare to past”

3. Choose second date range

4. Apply

Useful: Tracking outbound links

Many links on library sites are to third-party destinations Catalog Ejournals and databases Other sites

Cannot, by default, track click activity on outgoing links

1. Insert some code into the <head> of the page(s) on which you want to track outbound links to delay the link by a fraction of a second to give the page tracking code time to load. Google has a script for this: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527

2. Tag the specific link(s) you want to track so that the activity will be recorded in GA using a javascript onClick statement.

3. Wait 24-48 hours to give GA a chance to collect some data then:

4. IN GA go to Content > Event Tracking > Categories. There should now be a category there called “outbound links”, and within the category, data for each link.

1. Insert some code into the <head> of the page(s) on which you want to track outbound links:

function recordOutboundLink(link, category, action) {

_gat._getTrackerByName()._trackEvent(category, action);

setTimeout('document.location = "' + link.href + '"', 100);

</script>

Tag the specific link(s) you want to track so that the activity will be recorded in GA using a javascript onClick statement:

your link

the category the link label

Reporting

Analytics allows you to export any of your reports into: PDF - portable document format. You'll need the

free Adobe Reader software in order to view this file.

XML - extensible markup language. Excel - Microsoft Excel-formatted spreadsheet. TSV - tab separated values. This format can be read

in most spreadsheet applications or text editors.

Analytics will export the report with the settings currently showing on your screen, so make sure

that your date range and other settings are as you would like them

Reporting

To export a report:

1. Navigate to the report you'd like to export.

2. Click Export, below the report title.

3. Select one of the four export format options

4. Your file will be generated automatically.

Emailing

Reports can be emailed immediately or scheduled

Like exporting, you need to be viewing the exact report you want to email

Note that scheduled reports send data based on the previous day, week, month, or quarter

Questions?

After the session contact us at:

Jeff Wisniewskiwww.facebook.com/wisniewski.jeff

Darlene Fichter darlene.fichter AT usask.ca

Thank you

Resources

Google Analytics Help: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/

Google Code (Technical Documentation):http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/

Google Analytics Blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com/

Official Discussion Groups:http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/groups.html

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