Google AnalyticsMIT OpenCourseWare

2/3/2011

Why Analytics?

• Without analytics, you are ‘flying blind’.

• Are there navigational bottlenecks on my site?

• Are people using my site?

• Where is my traffic coming from?

• Are my site goals being accomplished?

• Are there usage trends?

• Are my marketing campaigns effective?

What is Google analytics (GA)?

• GA is a FREE service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.

• GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

• The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists.

• Google Analytics is used at around 49.95% of the top 1,000,000 websites (as currently ranked by Alexa).

• Google has purchased several analytics providers and created a very robust platform.

• Very clear user interface to analyze and manipulate data.

Source: Wikipedia

What to measure?

• Define a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)• Visits• Unique visitors• Average time on site• Bounce rate• Page views• New vs. returning visits• Performance of particular content• Navigational pathways• AdWord performance• Conversion goals

• Newsletter signup

• Donation

• Complete course

Getting started

• Create a Google account – if you already have gmail, then you have a Google account.

• Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ and create your analytics account

• Place GA JavaScript on every page of your site that you wish to measure.

That’s it, now just wait 24 hours to begin seeing your data.

Creating Goals

• A conversion goal can be anything that can defined by a URL path. • MIT OpenCourseWare Goals

• A user clicks ‘email this page’ and completes the action.

• A user completes the ‘newsletter signup’ form.• A user completes the donation form.

• Conversion funnels can be defined to visualize user flow towards a goal. 10 steps can be defined in funnel.

Newsletter Goal

Course Funnel

Course Funnel detail

Campaign and click tracking

GA allows for individual link tracking by use of UTM variable. This tracking variable can be put on the end of any link that you would like to track.

MIT OpenCourseWare uses these UTM tags to track newsletter campaign links, featured course links etc.

These clicks can then be tracked through a conversion paths.

General UTM Stats

UTM Goal track

In-Page analytics

In-Page analytics

Event Tracking

GA plugin for our video player (JW) that sends event information directly to our GA account .

• Video plays• Percentage of video played• Seconds played

Discrepancy between GA & Webtrends numbers

• GA excludes all crawlers, bots etc. Webtrends excludes a controlled list of crawlers and bots.

• Webtrends still mainly relies on log analysis vs. GA JavaScript and cookie.

• Users may have JavaScript disabled thus not registering with GA.

• GA tag is typically loaded last, if visitors click away before the tag is loaded, data is lost.

• Differences in KPI definitions.

• If GA JavaScript is not included on every page of site, stats will be different.

• IP exclusions/filtering may be different

Compare trends, not numbers.

Cons of GA

• Limited support.

• Limited customization.

• Does not tie into other applications. i.e. CRM

• Analytics are delayed up to 24 hours.

• Google holds your data.

• Cannot analyze historical data.

Questions?