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Google Analytics

Analytics data collects information about how users are working with your website. There are some powerful reports and tools that will help to understand if website goals are being met, links are being found, or if users are just not finding important resources.

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Ready, Set, Go!

As we roll out V5 templates the web team has been creating analytics codes for each site. New college / division level groups have been created so its easier to find sites. Basic analytics data should begin collecting for the site as soon as it moves into production.

Importance vs Usage

A major misconception can be just because something is clicked on or pages are loaded frequently that means the data there is important. Analytics will never be able to tell what data is important to a website. That's the job of the content owners. Content owners should know what they consider to be critical points for their sites.

Analytics is about user interaction. It will report on how users are working with a website. Websites are living documents and should be updated regularly. Make changes, add links to important resources, reorganize page content and analytics data will report if those updates are effective or not.

Basic information by default

Analytics reports by default on high level values such as page hits, user traffic, and basic events. If you are using info blocks and would like to know if specific items are being found you will need to do a little extra set up.

Get the most out of Info Blocks! Custom definition set up required

Read more below on how to get the most from the collected website data.

Access Analytics

The web team can help you get access to your analytics. You will log in with a Google account of your choice but access needs to be first set up.

Once you log in all of the websites you have accesss to can be found inside analytics. At the top is a drop down menu with additional sites. If new sites are added in the future they will automatically be found in the drop down.

Google Analytics

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Out of the box information

Analytics does a lot for you without much set up required. Below are the types of reports you can get just by logging in and viewing the dashboard.

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Usage Reports

Analytics can seem overwhelming, but the more you get famliar with it, the better web management you can achieve. Below are the three best areas to start reviewing your reports.

Acquisition

How users are finding website pages. If you want people to find a page specifically, or did you run a marketing campaign, this helps determine if it worked.

Direct links to content
Social media
Search engines

Engagement

What are users doing on the pages. There are several sections including Events, Pages and screens, and the Overview.

Links that are clicked
Page views and time spent on the site
Events can be extrememly useful but check out Custom Definitions to make sure you get the most out of your data

User

Analytics is an aggregate of all user data, not a single user. Check out the Tech reports for great insight on:

Desktop vs mobile use
Browsers being used
Screen resolution - how big is the screen size most users use

What's Important?

What pages are being used
What screen size is being used, desktop vs mobile
Landing pages people are finding
Traffic acquisition: how are people getting to the site

Site owners should know what information is considered a goal to be used.

If users don't seem to be loading that content, consider doing a marketing campaign or adding links to pages that are being used. Then review the analytics to see if users are changing behaviors.

Video Tutorials

If you want to see a few examples Google Analytics has done several tutorial videos which will walk you through the interface and how to work with it.

Reports In Google Analytics

User Properties in Google Analytics

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Info Blocks and Dynamic Data Analytics: Some Assembly Required

Dynamic data would be things that are pulled into your pages and do not get edited on the page where the user is viewing it. Things like RSS feeds, calendar data, event data, and info blocks are an example of dynamic data that is useful to understand how users are interacting with it. There is no automatic settings for data collection as Analytics has no way to know what content has been created, nor how to associate it with what need there is to track it.

Analytics will not track info block or other dynamic data until the definitions are created.
You will not be able to pull back dated information even if your site has been running analytics during that time.

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Custom Definitions - Tell Analytics What To Track

The templates are sending data to Analytics - in v5.14 and beyond, the templates have included extra details about user interactions. This data requires setting up Custom Definitions on the account be configured; otherwise, the extra event data is ignored.

Custom Definitions will only be available 24 - 48 hours after set up and then from that point forward. Old data, even if it was sent, will not be complied.

Custom Definitions Guide

To make this as painless as possible, we understand this is new, we have preset some of the tracking data parameters. Use this guide to create custom definitions that will help you compile usage reports for anything that users a blog, application, directory, etc on the website.

Custom Definitions

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