1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS:
AN INTRODUCTION
Michelle Belden
Access Archivist, Penn State Special Collections
PALA 2012

2. WHY GOOGLE ANALY TICS?
 Free
 Sufficient for most libraries
 Easy to implement
 Fairly easy to understand

3. CONSIDERATIONS
 Data that won’t go through:
Users who disable Javascript, block cookies
 No reporting is 100% accurate. Focus on trends.
 Privacy:
 Data is anonymous
 No Personally Identifiable Data
 Not shared with 3 rd parties

4. GETTING STARTED
 Sign up for a Google account
 http://www.google.com/analytics / to get tracking code
 Insert code into web pages
 Bottom of head section of HTML
 For large sites, put in template

5. DASHBOARD

6. WHAT DOES IT MEASURE?
Visitor characteristics
 Traffic
 Content effectiveness

7. A FEW TERMS TO KNOW
 Visitors – randomly assigned ID and timestamp
 New and returning
 Visits/sessions
 Page Views
 Unique page views
 Bounce Rate

8. VISITORS 1: OVERVIEW

9. VISITORS 2: MOBILE DEVICES

10. TRAFFIC 1: OVERVIEW

11. TRAFFIC 2: KEYWORDS

12. CONTENT 1: OVERVIEW

13. CONTENT 2: IN PAGE ANALY TICS

14. SO WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?
 Especially when you’re just getting started, you might be
interested in general questions:
 Where your visitors are coming from
 What browser/resolution they are using
 Most popular content
 Pages with highest bounce rate
 As you go along, more specific questions might arise, like:
 Is this digital project getting enough use to justify further work?

15. VISITORS 3: SERVICE PROVIDERS

16. VISITORS 4: MAP OVERLAY

17. MORE ADVANCED USE
 What are the goals of your site?
 How will you measure those goals?
 Example: we want our users to find our “finding aids”
 “Conversion”: hit on page whose URL begins with:
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/dam/psul/up/digital/findingaids /
 You can even assign monetary values to these “conversions”
 Can also look at time on site, pages per visit
(Is the content sticky? Or is it just hard to find things?
Maybe it’s time for some user studies -)

18. FUNNELS
• Series of URLs you think users will/should follow
• Find out where you’re losing them
• You can also find paths you didn’t foresee

19. LEARN MORE!
 http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/