Google Analytics for Your
Department’s Website

Quick Start Guide

Introduction

Some of this section has been excerpted from Wikipedia.2

Google Analytics (GA) is used supply information about the visitors’ usage of your department’s Villanova website.

You can see how many visits your site received, average time spent on the site, new or repeat visitors, referring site, when visitors viewed your site, if visitors used a mobile device, what browsers visitors used, bounce rates[1], visitor’s geographic location, etc.

Each department has their own gmail account and password to access GA for your department’s website. UNIT has done the java script coding on your department’s webpage to enable GA; so you only need to (1) login to GA using your department’s gmail account and password; and then (2) view and analyze the data being reported.

GA's reporting approach is to show high level dashboard-type data, and give you the ability via links or drop down menus to analyze more in-depth data further into the report.

See Wikipedia for additional information.

Data Accuracy-Limitations

Quoted from Wikipedia:[2]

Filters: Many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Firefox's Adblock and NoScript) can block the Google Analytics Tracking Code “GATC”. This prevents some traffic and users from being tracked, and leads to holes in the collected data. Privacy networks like Tor will mask the user's actual location and present inaccurate geographical data.

JavaScript: Some users do not have JavaScript-enabled/capable browsers or turn this feature off.

The largest potential impact on data accuracy comes from users deleting or blocking Google Analytics cookies.

Cookies: Without cookies being set, GA cannot collect data. Any individual web user can block or delete cookies resulting in the data loss of those visits for GA users.

Mobile Phones: Because GA uses a page tagging technique to collect visitor information via a combination of JavaScript and cookies, it has limitations with websites browsed from mobile phones. This is because only the latest phones are currently able to run JavaScript or set cookies.

Before You Begin

You need to know your department’s Google email and password. You can request this via a help desk ticket (assigned to Operations) or ask someone in your department who currently has access to give you the Google Analytics credentials.

Access Google Analytics

  • Open your browser
  • Navigate to www.googleanalytics.com

  • Click Access Analytics
  • Type in your department’s gmail account and password
  • You are automatically taken to your department's analytics site.

Reports Overview Screen

Your report is broken into different sections. The top has menu items. The left side is the navigation pane. The dashboard is on the right which displays a quick overview of your site usage.

Below the Dashboard are various information panels which display different types of data and may contain links or drop down menu.

Dashboard Section

The Dashboard defaults to display one month of site views.

Use the “Advanced Segments” drop down (top right) to change All Visits options; or use the “Date” drop down to change the time period and/or to compare to another time period.

Use the “Visits tab” drop down to view other options.

Use the “Graph by: Day/Week/Month” icons to change the displayed time frame.

Site Usage Section


This helpful section gives you a quick overview of how your site traffic is doing.

It displays the number of visits to your site, the number of individual pages viewed within your site, averages how many pages a visitor viewed per visit, displays the bounce rate1, the average time a visitor spent at your site, and the number of new visits to your site.

Each site usage name can be clicked to reveal greater details.

For example, clicking the “Visits” link provides additional daily detail:

You can easily track if a marketing event, such as an email blast with your URL, is successful.

Visitors Overview Section

The Visitors Overview section displays a graph of data points and allows you to mouse over a point on the graph to obtain more detail.

Click the “view report” link to display visitor segmentation (languages, location), and technical information (browsers used.)

Map Overlay Section

The Map Overlay section displays (in gradients of color) your visitors’ geographic location.

Click the “view report” link to display additional details by each geographic location.

Traffic Sources Overview Section

This section displays numbers and percentages on how your visitors arrived at your site: a referred site, via a search engine, or via a direct URL.

Click the “view report” link to display the traffic sources and also view the keyword search sources. (See the YouTube video listed in the Reference section on keywords and bounce rates.)

Content Overview Section

This section displays numbers and percentages for each pageview in your site, listed by its URL.

Using Analytics Tips: When viewing various sections of your Google Analytics report, don’t forget to click links and check out what options are in drop down menus.

Email Reports to Yourself

You have the ability to have a custom report emailed to you and others on the spot or scheduled when you want, e.g., daily, weekly, etc.

To Send or Schedule an Email Report:

  • Click the “Email” icon at the top of the Dashboard.
  • Two tabs appear in the Set Up Email: Dashboard: “Send Now” and “Schedule.”
  • Complete the fields on the preferred tab.
  • Click the “Send” (or “Schedule”) icon when finished.

Villanova’s IP Address

Villanova’s IP addresses start with 153.104.xx.xx

Additional Resources

Ø  Wikipedia

Ø  “Google Analytics Guide” from GA’s Help link

Ø  Google Analytics Product Tour from left menu

Ø  Google Analytics YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/googleanalytics?utm_source=newbieemail0&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=en_us#p/u/14/_qfG2d9etvk

Ø  LinkedIn Group: Google Analytics

Action Items

Ø  Obtain your Google Analytics login credentials for your department.

Ø  See which pages drive the most page views on your site from the Top Content report. This report can answer questions you have about your most or least effective pages - for example, a high bounce rate (>70%) indicates a landing page that should be considered for redesign.

Ø  Schedule an email to send automatic reports, e.g., monthly which compares the previous month.

______

Villanova UNIT Training© Sept. 2011 5

[1] Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. <70% is a good rate.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics