Back Burner Analytics
Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot more from our clients (and prospective clients) about website analytics. Everybody’s thinking about pageviews, hits, time on site, landing pages, internal and external visitors, and they should be: analytics is a critical part of not only proving the value of the investment an institution makes in its website, but also continually improving that site based on user feedback.
Unfortunately, a lot of what we hear is “we have Google Analytics installed, but no one is using it for much of anything.” It’s one of many things that gets pushed to the back burner when we’re focused on social media, mobile sites, implementing content management systems, producing videos and writing great content. The good news is that even if you don’t have time to focus on analytics this week or this month, there’s a lot you can do right now to be sure that you’ll have something to work with when you move analytics to the front burner and turn up the heat.
Get tracking.
An awful lot of folks are using Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy to implement on a site, and it provides some good functionality. If you don’t already have an analytics tool, keep it simple and install Google Analytics. But in higher education, be sure to think about more than just the main .edu site—consider tracking on microsites, blogs, athletics, and departmental servers as well. The Google Analytics tracking code is easy to install, and ensures that you have a way to record the traffic to the sites you would care most about, even if you won’t use it right away. Once you’re ready to consider your metrics more closely, you’ll already have a baseline set.
Be sure you are collecting data. For those of you who already have GA installed, you want to be sure that you’re actually gathering the information you want. The little piece of Google Analytics javascript tracking code needs to be installed on every page on your site. It’s easier said than done on sites that don’t use a content management system or are scattered groups of pages with different authors using different tools. Try this:
- Log into the Google Analytics site and click “view report” from the landing page showing your domains/profiles to view your data.
- Check to see that you have positive numbers that continue up to the present. You can also change the date parameters (in the top right of reports) to look back and check the data that you’ve been gathering. You can’t change the past, but you can be informed about what data you have collected. In higher education it is particularly useful to have a full year of consistent data, because year-over-year comparisons help to compare admissions cycles, the ebb and flow of semesters, and the other cycles that impact your audiences.
- Make sure the number of pageviews passes the “sniff test”—are the numbers in a reasonable ballpark for the content? It’s usually an issue of there being none or only a handful of pageviews which could indicate a problem. Click “Content” in the left navigation and check the “Top Content” report and make sure that pages you expect to be the most visited have lots of visits.
- Verify that there are pageviews across a variety of pages. If you aren’t sure whether tracking code is installed on certain pages, look for those pages in the “Top Content” report. Analytics are only gathered for pages with the tracking code, so in cases where the code isn’t easily added universally on the site, check specific pages to see that data is recorded for them.
Remember, you can’t recreate data that was never captured, so don’t make assumptions about what Google Analytics is gathering for you now. Be sure you’re getting what you need. Even if you aren’t doing much (or anything) with the analytics now, collecting good data will serve you well whenever you do train your focus on the analytics.
Own the account that collects your analytics. Some institutions have analytics accounts set up by a vendor and installed on a website for them. They have access to the data, but the account is not controlled by the institution itself, which means all data collected in the account is not controlled by the institution. Historical data can’t be moved from one account to another, so it’s important to “own your data”. Google stores the data, but the account owner controls access to it.
Higher education institutions should control their own free Google Analytics account and not be under the umbrella of another entity. If you have data going to an account that you don’t own, consider setting up your own account and swapping the existing tracking code for your new version. There won’t be continuity in the “old” vs. “new” account data since it will be in two places, but the sooner you control your data the better. You can still compare data between the two accounts and over time the data collected in the new account will be all you need.
Track site search. One of the simplest customizations you can make to Google Analytics is to enable search tracking, but Google Analytics does not do this by default. After viewing your reports in Google Analytics, click on the “Content” reports in the left navigation, and click on “Site Search”. Google will tell you right away if it is tracking search or not and provides instructions if you aren’t. Gathering data about what visitors are searching for on your site can be extremely valuable. Start collecting the data, even if you don’t know when you’ll get around to doing anything with it.
Get in a proactive frame of mind. When you do start to think about how website analytics can help you, stay away from getting overly excited about how many people are looking at content on your site. Higher ed sites get a lot of traffic—there are built-in audiences seeking you out! Instead, consider a more nuanced approach. Think about what how understanding visitor behavior on your site can help you do your job better—producing more useful content, improving information architecture, directing people to things they’re really looking for, giving key audiences reasons to take the next step with you, promoting events, ideas, people or programs that showcase your best assets.
Websites analytics are a great tool, and even more valuable when you’ve got a strong history to look back on. Do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to be sure your analytics data will be there when you need it—it will repay you in kind when you’re ready to move ahead.
The reason people don’t use Google Analytics “for much of anything” is because they don’t know what the measurements tell them. When you install the analytics without objectives first, you are setting yourself up for confusion. Just to know how much time somebody spends on my site tells me nothing unless I am measuring it because I have an objective it matches. I am afraid all the talk about analytics really is pointless unless we first help people set up measurable objectives and then look for a metric that matches. Thanks for keeping the discussion going.
Posted on March 27, 2011 by Chris Syme
Hi Chris,
I couldn’t agree more about having objectives and using analytics to improve and measure the success of the website. Analytics can be a powerful force for improving a site, but it can also just be a lot of useless data if not used with purpose.
I do emphasis collecting data to have a baseline that is there for folks when they ARE ready for it, especially since it’s so easy with Google Analytics. What I hope to emphasize in the post is the value of having a baseline set of data, even if objectives for how to use the data are still on the back burner. We sometimes see people start to measure some specifics with their analytics, but find they lack baseline data that they thought they were collecting.
Thanks for reading and discussing!
Posted on March 28, 2011 by Greg Zguta