Monday, October 20th, 3:30 to 5:00 Presenters: Laurie Welling & Carole Myles of Assumption College
What is Google Analytics?
- Free tool to track usage patterns on your library website.
- Analytics vs statistics
- Generates metrics: unique ip addresses accessing the site, pages visited, how often and how long, peak periods of use Why did we select Google Analytics?
- was designed for eCommerce sites
Why did we select Google Analytics?
- Track user navigation patterns
- Make improvements based on our GA stats
- It’s free!
How did we implement Google Analytics?
- Need a Google account like Gmail in order to sign up
- Create a free Google account
- Log in to GA
- Add a profile
- Enter the URL you want to track
- Activate tracking by inserting system-generated script into your webpages
- Add users (They can receive reports via email weekly, monthly, quarterly)
- Edit profile
The Dashboard
- Set date ranges
- Customize, and geographical locations
- Explore all reports by “drilling down” to ever greater detail. The bemailed reports won’t show this. You have to be an active user to go online and drill down.
- Look at content overview, visitors, traffic sources, goals (goals are eCommerce-oriented)
- Explore Saved Reports by “drilling down”: visitors overview, traffic sources, map overlay, content over view
- In Visitors Overview, you can look at visitors’ browsers, operating systems, languages, network locations
- In Traffic Sources, you can look at percentages of visitors from Direct Traffic (knowing the URL), Search Engines, and Referring Sites
- Map Overlay will show you exactly where your traffic is coming from: Country, State, City
- Content Overview will show you what the visitors are looking at and for how long.
Conclusion: Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for tracking the traffic to your website, and relatively easy to configure and analyze. You could do it in a matter of hours. Use it to drive the website design, to redirect library resources where needed most, to plan.
Jay Rancourt
Filed under: nela2008 | Tagged: online usage, online usage patterns, statistics, website traffic, X nela2008 | Comments Off
