Understanding your Audience Through Numbers
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The document provides an overview of web analytics, emphasizing its importance in measuring and optimizing web usage through data analysis. It details how analytics can track visitor journeys, site performance, content effectiveness, business goals, and campaign effectiveness while providing insights into user engagement and e-commerce activities. Additionally, it includes case studies on integrating Google Analytics with UPortal and CAS, offering practical instructions for data gathering and reporting.
Understanding your Audience Through Numbers
- 1. Understanding Your Audience Through Numbers Web Analytics and Case Studies using uPortal and CAS
- 2. Overview Web Analyticsby Peter Sentz (Brigham Young University)
- 3. What is Web Analytics? • “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” (Lord Kelvin) • Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data • Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
- 4. What Does Web Analytics Measure? • Visitor’s onsite journey • Site Features & Layout • Content Effectiveness • Business Goals (Filters & Funnels) • Campaigns & E-commerce • Traffic & SEO • Site technical design & performance
- 5. Visitor’s onsite journey • Detailed statistics about visitors to a website Impacted by marketing activities, site design & performance, site promotion • Have sessions (visits) increased? Decreased? Remained flat? • Where are most of your visitors located? Age, Gender? Are they new or returning? How often? What technologies do they use? • Browser/OS, Language, Network, Mobile, Devices Visitors: Cookie marks first visitor id + first initial timestamp Visit/Session: A series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. (closing browser or inactive ends session) Visitor Session: The time a visitor spends on a Website. The longer a visitor stays on your Website, the more relevant it appears to search engines.
- 6. Site Features & Layout • Measures how visitors are using your site and indicates how site interaction can be improved • What landing pages of your site are visitors drawn to? o Paths (Flows) & site navigation o Time on Site (Engagement) o What action(s) do you want people to take? Goals, Transactions, Events Pageviews: Displays the number of times your website pages were viewed, A browser page refresh = new page view Ex. 1 Visitor can visit the site 2 times and have 5 pageviews
- 7. Content Effectiveness • Measures which content is the most popular • Am I creating effective content? o Informative and up to date content, easy to use navigation • What pages do people visit, then immediately leave? o Landing Pages Bounce Rate (Exit Pages) Bounce Rate: The percentage of web site visitors who arrive at a web site entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site.
- 8. Business Goals (Funnels) • Build, track, and improve the business goals that you set • Have a Plan o Analytics is worth more as part of process and provides business justification & direction • Define Goals and Conversion Funnels o Goal is usually a “Thank you” or confirmation page • Measure trends o Correlate to Business Results Funnels: Series of steps a visitor completes to reach an end goal. (Up to ten pages for GA) Funnels can show you where visitors abandon the process during the path to conversion. Conversion: Conversions occur when a visitor comes to your site and completes a desired goal or action. (Completing a purchase, submitting a contact form, etc.)
- 9. Campaigns • Measures how your site aligns to your marketing goals and campaigns o Are your marketing efforts generating the desired action(s)? o How can I make my marketing campaigns more effective and accountable? o Are customers signing up for services? (e.g.: Email blast) o Adwords and Paid Search Advertising o Display/Banner Ad Planning & Placement • Use it to find trends, Not absolute figures Campaigns: Information about the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. You can see which types advertising efforts give you the most traffic and align that to the employees responsible for driving those efforts.
- 10. E-commerce • Measures sales, purchases and customer billing effectiveness o Where and why are shoppers abandoning my shopping cart? • Segment and analyze your data, and discover relationships between your marketing campaigns, user engagement, and transactions o Products can be sold at $0 and still be tracked • Use it to find trends, Not absolute figures Ecommerce: The purchasing or selling of products or services over the Internet.
- 11. Traffic & SEO • What sites are delivering visitors to my website? o Traffic Sources: Direct to Site, Organic Search, Paid Search, Referral • Keywords, Referral Traffic, Pages • Social Media Marketing • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) o Local Search Optimization (Site Search, Queries) Direct Traffic: User enters a URL into their browser's address bar or uses a bookmark. Illustrates how many visitors know your brand. Organic Traffic: Visitors who come to your Website from unpaid organic or natural search engine results. Paid Traffic: Visitors who come to your Website from Google AdWords ads, paid search engine keywords and other online paid ad campaigns. Referring Sites: Other Websites that refer or send visitors to your Website are called referring sites. Focus more resources on sites that are referring more traffic, or re-evaluate your campaigns on sites that are not driving much traffic.
- 12. Site technical design & performance • Site Speed • Page Timings • Events
- 13. What Blocks Web Analytics? o Disabled Javascript o Blocked all cookies o Deleted Cookies • Comes up as new visitor though o Error in Javascript prior to analytics code o Mobile Devices with no Javascript enabled
- 14. Google Analytics Advantages o Free o Easy to implement Basic install is robust Google Site Search integration o Personalized o Easy to use Sufficiant possibilities for most companies Highly Customizable Dashboards Many Easy to Understand Reports Exports •Several Formats •Scheduled
- 15. Google Analytics with uPortal and CAS Case Studies
- 16. uPortal & Google Analytics by Laura McCord (uPortal Steering Committee Member & Documentation Coordinator) • Integrating Google Analytics into uPortal o What you will need? Google Analytics Account A uPortal version 4.x instance ready for data gathering o Instructions are available at https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Google+Analytics • Instructions have been gathered collectively through years of community contributions o Direct Objectives Be able to gather uPortal login data into Google Analytics Be able to create a custom report • create dimensions • create segments o Indirect Objective What improvements can be made to the official uPortal manual page?
- 17. CAS & Google Analytics by Tom Freestone Brigham Young University • Integrating Google Analytics into CAS o What you will need? 1. Google Analytics Account 2. Find the tracking code snippet for your property 3. (Admin -> Tracking Info / Tracking Code) 4. Copy tracking code snippet. It starts with <script> and ends with </script>. 5. Paste your snippet (unaltered) into your top.jsp • cas-server-webapp/src/main/webapp/WEB- INF/view/jsp/default/ui/includes/top.jsp 6. Verify it is working
- 18. Questions Web Analytics: Peter Sentz peter_sentz@byu.edu uPortal: Laura McCord laura@whitewhale.net CAS: Tom Freestone freestone@byu.edu