I met with Martha Bushong of the Volgenau School to review their analytics.
I gave her an overview of the information available in the standard Google Analytics reports, as well as the custom tracking (of embedded YouTube video interactions, etc.) provided for by the Standard Mason GTM container.
We looked specifically into the activity surrounding their recently-released 2017 Annual Report. The PDF of the report was posted to their website on October 5th, and it received a spike in traffic on the following Monday, October 9th.
We reviewed the data for visits from the vanity URLs in the printed Annual Report. So far there has been very little traffic to these redirect URLs, but we confirmed that the tracking of visits from the printed report is working in principle. We are not sure if the printed pieces have hit mailboxes yet.
We also identified that the referral exclusion list was mis-configured to categorize referral traffic from all gmu.edu subdomains as direct traffic. I corrected this issue and made an annotation in the analytics view.
In order to help them set-up specialized reporting, I asked her to brainstorm about what specific questions they have about their website usage. We plan to meet again to dive into customized reporting.
I stressed the importance of campaign-tagging (in their email communications in particular) and the idea of coordinating campaign tagging across multiple channels (email, print, social, etc.).