Understanding Your

Audience Through

Numbers

Web Analytics and Case Studies using

uPortal and CAS

Overview

Web Analyticsby Peter Sentz (Brigham Young University)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Business Goals (Funnels)

• Build, track, and improve the business goals that you

set

• Have a Plano Analytics is worth more as part of process and provides business

justification & direction

• Define Goals and Conversion Funnelso Goal is usually a “Thank you” or confirmation page

• Measure trendso 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.)

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.

E-commerce

• Measures sales, purchases and customer billing

effectivenesso Where and why are shoppers abandoning my shopping cart?

• Segment and analyze your data, and discover

relationships between your marketing campaigns, user

engagement, and transactionso Products can be sold at $0 and still be tracked

• Use it to find trends, Not absolute figuresEcommerce: The purchasing or selling of products or services over the

Internet.

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.

Site technical design & performance

• Site Speed

• Page Timings

• Events

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

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

Google Analytics with uPortal and CAS

Case Studies

uPortal & Google Analyticsby 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?

CAS & Google Analyticsby 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

Questions Web Analytics: Peter Sentz peter_sentz@byu.edu

uPortal: Laura McCord laura@whitewhale.net

CAS: Tom Freestone freestone@byu.edu