Analytics

Creating a Google Analytics dashboard

Learn how to create an Analytics Dashboard within your Google Analytics Account.

Workshop Presentation (Google Slides)

Get to know Google Analytics  (Basic benchmarks and what they mean!)

Determining your metrics

When determining metrics the most important things to think about are:

• What are the macro/micro conversions you want to see

  • Macro conversions: what is the ultimate goal you want visitors to accomplish (E.G. a recruiting site would have a macro conversion of “someone submitting an application”)

  • Micro conversions: What are some smaller factors that show interest in macro conversions (E.G. someone reading about student clubs on a recruiting site)

• What are the key site pages

  • Important to work out beforehand what the client (department chair) is interested in knowing 

Communications and Marketing often uses the following metrics 

• Who is our target audience

• What do they want to find

• What do we want them to know 

• How are they finding us

In general: when looking at higher ed websites it is important to look at data using a year long reference window (google analytics defaults to a week). Higher ed web traffic tends to vary over the course of the year (E.G. in application season traffic goes way up), so smaller time windows generally aren’t too helpful.

What do department chairs want to see?

• Topline metrics

• Most Popular Pages

• Most popular faculty pages

• Most popular research pages

• Masters interest vs PhD interest

  • Pages associated with masters and PhD interest

• Giving traffic

What do we need?

• Everything in the department chair report plus

  • Keywords associated with organic search

  • Top forward paths (where people go after our site)

    • This is set up through google event traffic which measures and records tasks completed on the site (E.G. Playing a video, resizing an image, clicking a link, etc). Use something called google tag manager

    • C&M web pages already do this for you

    • If you aren’t on a C&M site and want this functionality feel free to email Alison (atuck@umich.edu)

Building the dashboard

• Go into customization and click on the “dashboard” option. Hit the “create” button

  • Will be given a choice of “blank canvas” and “Starter Dashboard” Starter dashboard is super generic so it will probably be easier to start from the blank canvas. You can additionally select “import template” to use Alison’s custom templates

• Widgets

  • In Analytics you are allowed only 12 (which is generally enough information when presenting to department chairs). If you need more you can use a free product called google data studio

  • When naming widgets be sure to use something you understand, there is no point in using the technical term if you have to look it up every time

  • When setting up a widget, if you’re feeling cautious you can set a filter (e.g. Only show ->Page->containing->”aero”) This will only show sessions that happen under the “aero” subdomain.

  • Email Traffic: use source and sessions as your metrics. Set a medium filter for only email. This will give you a list of email links and the number of sessions each generated 

    • Can use the same filter to get website referrals (which sites people are coming from) 

If you are going to be visiting your page a ton and don’t want your traffic to be shown in your analytics you can install the chrome extension ublock origin, this will exclude your traffic from being shown

• Setting a send schedule

  • Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to (I.E. make sure that you have dashboards sent to you first, then forward it, with some context, in an email).

  • Context is key

  • How much do they care

  • How frequently are you going to pivot

• Caveats

  • You can only create 12 widgets on a dashboard

  • Make sure that you’ve explored enough to follow up on questions

  • Be ready to say “I don’t know, but I can find”

  • Take everything with a grain of salt and within the context of human behavior

  • Keep an eye on Ann Arbor traffic

Questions

Can we see if people from other schools/areas are visiting our site?

• For now this is not something that’s allowed for privacy reasons. We can however look at referral traffic (I.E. what web source our traffic comes from) to get a bit of this picture

Is there a way to see if a page is getting more hits because of a news hit?

• Usually pretty tricky as lots of times news sites won’t be nice enough to  link our web pages. You can use google trends to see if there is a spike in web traffic around the time of the news story. Additionally you can use referral date if the news story contained a UM link. An uptick in organic search referrals could also indicate traffic from a news story that didn’t link back to us directly

Can we use adwords to know what people are searching to get to our site?

• Not exactly, it won’t give you a direct breakdown, but adwords does provide a list of top bidable words, which would indicate which keywords are driving the most traffic. Google intentionally keeps this vague to keep their revenue stream intact.

How do I know what a normal measurement is for a specific metric?

• There isn’t a direct answer. In general your best benchmark is yourself. Also be sure to keep an eye on time periods, year long data is much more relevant than week long data.