Note: you can download these – and other Mason-related – custom segments from the Mason-Related Custom Segments page.
We have talked before about how to use a custom segment in Google Analytics to identify ‘on-campus” traffic.
You can also use Google Analytics to segment for traffic from an individual campus.
Review: Identifying “On-Campus” Users
George Mason University acts as its own Internet Service Provider (ISP). This means that all internet traffic originating from the George Mason network can be identified by looking for a “Service Provider” (or “ISP Organization” – this same field is called by two different names in different places within GA) value of “george mason university”. This alone will allow you to segment for either “on-campus” or “off-campus” traffic.
Note that this is not a perfect solution. For example:
- if a user is physically located on-campus, but is accessing the internet via a mobile device over the cell-phone network, this traffic would appear to be off-campus – since they are not using the Mason network;
- conversely, if a user is physically off-campus – for example working from home – and it connected to the Mason network via VPN, their traffic would appear to be “on-campus”.
Nevertheless, it is a pretty good approximation of on-campus/off-campus status.
Identifying Traffic from Specific Campuses
We can extend the above segment slightly to include the users “city” to identify the individual campuses.
Example
Account: Mason Office of Communications and Marketing 01
Property: www2.gmu.edu
View: [PROD] www2.gmu.edu – default 2.0 (2017-06-25)
Report: Audience -> Geo -> Location
Date Range: Jan 1, 2018 – Jan 31,2018
Segment: Service Provider: George Mason University (“On-Campus”)
Drill-down: United States -> Virginia
This will display the cities in Virginia which sent traffic to the core website in January 2018 from the ISP “george mason university”.
Note the included cities: Fairfax, Arlington, Bull Run, Front Royal. These correspond to our four locations.
This means that creating a segment that filters for a “Service Provider” of “george mason university”, and one of the above cities, you can segment by campus.
