About Mason Web Analytics

Depending on your needs or the question you are trying to answer, it can be very helpful to view web analytics for an individual website, a collection of websites (such as for an entire academic unit), or even an aggregated view of web analytics across all Mason websites.

Therefore the Mason-standard analytics implementation provides for 3 level of aggregation:

• individual website properties
• unit/department-level aggregated properties (known as “roll-ups”)
• the university-level “roll-up” property

When someone visits your website, their analytics data is sent to a Google Analytics property for the individual website, but it is also sent to the appropriate unit-level roll-up (if applicable), and to the university roll-up.

In this way, website owners and marketers can look at their individual website analytics data, but they can also look at the data from the point of view of a unit/department or the university as a whole.

It’s important to remember that most of our web traffic takes place across multiple websites, and that user sessions are not always limited to a single website. Therefore viewing visits in a larger context is often helpful to understanding a users overall “website visit”, and viewing traffic from only the point of view of an individual website does not always provide a complete picture.

In order to ensure that aggregated analytics data is valid, it is important that all websites collect analytics data using the same methods. Therefore having a standard implementation is critical.

In order to ensure that the aggregated analytics data is useful, it is critical that there be coordination in how analytics information is labelled. Analytics events, marketing campaign links, etc. should be tagged using a consistent tagging/labelling scheme.

For example, if different websites owners all labelled their email campaign tag medium parameters differently (e.g. “email”,”e-mail”,mail”,”newsletter”, or “Constant Contact”) it would be much more difficult to assess Mason’s email marketing efforts in an aggregated context.

As important as consistency and coordination are to web analytics, websites also need to have the flexibility to handle custom tracking and marketing needs.

The Mason-standard analytics implementation provides for consistent data collection, but provides room for flexibility and custom tracking. We have built a framework that includes site-specific and/or vendor-specific customizations.

We use Google Analytics to collect website analytics data.

We maintain a separate Google Analytics property for each website, as well as an aggregated a unit/department level roll-up for each unit/department which combined the web traffic for all of the unit/department websites, and the university-wide Mason Google Analytics roll-up property.

Google Analytics is implemented on our websites via Google Tag Manager.

Each website has a separate Google Tag Manager container.

These Mason-standard GTM containers contain a few specific settings that we configure for each website (what website it is for, where its analytics data should be sent, etc.), all of the elements required for our standard analytics data collection, and a couple of additional folder for site-specific customizations:

• site customizations
• vendor additions

Any custom items that website owners want to track specifically for an individual website, which are not part of our standard data collection, go in the site customizations folder in the GTM container.

Any custom items added by third-party vendors go in the vendor additions folder.

This structure very useful, because it individual website owners the flexibility to be able to track whatever they need to. At the same time, it makes it possible to keep track of what elements are part of our standard analytics collection and which elements are specific to individual websites.