2016-03-23

Meeting Information

Date: 3/23/2016
Time: 2pm
Location: Merten 2500

Agenda

Review of Roll-Up Accounts

  • Financial Aid website included in Roll-Up as of March 15th
  • Beginning process to add Volgenau to roll-up property
  • Added annotations:

    • 8/10/2015: Mason Core website launched
    • 3/15/2016: Financial Aid website added
    • More to be added…

    to Mason Analytics Roll-Up views:

    • Roll-up View
    • Roll-Up 2.0 – All Traffic – Effective January 2016
    • Roll-Up 2.0 – Off-Campus Traffic Only – Effective January 2016

New Custom Report: Pageviews: Page -> Network Drill Down

This report will help to determine what percentage of a particular page’s traffic was from Mason vs. non-Mason.

Link to import: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=0iozemmySJCHUCfGfwvN_g

Example: compare Roll-Up 2.0 All Traffic view vs. Off-Campus Traffic Only view

Segments vs. Filters

Filters are hit-based. Segments are session- or user-based.

Filters return only the hits that match the filter. Segments return all hits from users or sessions that are part of the segment.

This means that segmenting does not necessarily return the data you might expect.

Example 1: Traffic to the grad admissions homepage

	Account: admissions.gmu.edu
		Property: http://admissions.gmu.edu
			View: _Standard View
				Report: Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages
					Date range: July 2015
						Note distribution of pages viewed.
					Create segment: grad admissions homepage
						Note distribution of pages viewed.
							*Why are there additional pages??
	

What do these data show?

How to create this segment:

Add Segment -> +New Segment -> Advanced -> Conditions -> ‘Sessions’ -> ‘Include’ -> Page -> ‘/grad/default.asp’

Note statistics at right.

Example 2: On-Campus Traffic

	Account: Mason Analytics Roll-Up
		Property: Rollup Property
			View: Roll-Up 2.0 - All Traffic - Effective January 2016
				Report: Audience -> Technology -> Network
					Date range: July 2015
						Note distribution of Service Providers
					Create segment: GMU sessions
						Note distribution of Service Providers
						*This is a case where segments can trick you!
					Create segment: GMU users
						Note distribution of Service Providers
	

How to create this segment:

Add Segment -> +New Segment -> Advanced -> Conditions -> ‘Sessions’ or ‘Users’ -> ‘Include’ -> Service Provider -> ‘george mason university’

Mason Core Webste Referral Traffic: Review/Discussion

Referral Traffic Is Reported to be Down from Last Year
	======================================================

	Is referral traffic down from last year?
	----------------------------------------

	Example 1 (Business):
		Account: School of Business
			Property: business.gmu.edu
				View: business.gmu.edu
					Report: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals
						Date range: Feb 2016 vs. Feb 2015 
						Filter: www2.gmu.edu|^gmu.edu|admissions.gmu.edu (Mason 'core')
							Result: down 13.48%
						Filter: gmu.edu (all GMU domain referrals)
							Result: down 22.47%
	Example 2 (CHHS): 
		Account: College of Health and Human Services
			Property: http://chss.gmu.edu
				View: college of health and human services
					Report: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals
						Date range: Feb 2016 vs. Feb 2015 
						Filter: www2.gmu.edu|^gmu.edu|admissions.gmu.edu (Mason 'core')
							Result: down 17.41%
						Filter: gmu.edu (all GMU domain referrals)
							Result: down 20.06%
	Example 3 (SCAR): 
		Account: scar.gmu.edu
			Property: http://scar.gmu.edu
				View: scar.gmu.edu
					Report: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals
						Date range: Feb 2016 vs. Feb 2015 
						Filter: www2.gmu.edu|^gmu.edu|admissions.gmu.edu (Mason 'core')
							Result: down 7.44%
						Filter: gmu.edu (all GMU domain referrals)
							Result: down 4.80%
	Example 4 (COS): 
		Account: cos.gmu.edu
			Property: http://cos.gmu.edu
				View: All Website Data [raw]
					Report: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals
						Date range: Feb 2016 vs. Feb 2015 
						Filter: www2.gmu.edu|^gmu.edu|admissions.gmu.edu (Mason 'core')
							Result: down 57.31%
						Filter: gmu.edu (all GMU domain referrals)
							Result: down 44.24%

	Result: referral traffic appears to be down from last year.


	Why is referral traffic down?
	-----------------------------

	Possibility 1: Have colleges made changes to their analytics configuration?
		-Additional filters
		-Bot/spider filtering
	Possibility 2: Is there now more information available on Mason core, obviating the need to go to college sites for information as often as in the past?
	Possibility 3: Is traffic down overall?
		
	Is traffic down overall?
	------------------------

	Example 1 (Original Roll-Up)
		* Note: does not filter out bots and spiders - so we know it's apples-to-apples.
		Account: Mason Analytics Roll-Up
			Property: Rollup Property
				View: Roll-up view
					Report: Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages
						Date range: Feb 2016 vs. Feb 2015 
						Filter: ^www2.gmu.edu/$|^www.gmu.edu/$ (Mason Homepage - same on old and new site)
							Result: down 38.67%

	Why is referral traffic down?
	-----------------------------

	Further analysis is needed. I recommend segmenting the data in various ways to see if there are particular segments that are under-represented compared to last year.

	

Debrief

Mason Core Webste Referral Traffic

We’re trying to look in more detail at what is happening with referral traffic to the college websites and whether it is actually down in relative terms.

To that end, if you are interested, we would suggest looking at the following metric for a given time period after the launch of the new Mason core website compared to the corresponding time period pre-launch:

(number of sessions on your college’s website(s) which were referred from the Mason core website) divided by (Mason core homepage pageviews)

In other words, this would indicate that for every X pageviews on the Mason homepage, your college received Y referral sessions from the core website.

Example:
For a given time range:
1000 pageviews on mason homepage;
100 referred sessions to your college’s website;
100/1000=0.10=10%
i.e. 10% of homepage pageviews resulted in referred sessions to your college’s website, or: for each ten views of the Mason homepage, your college’s website received one referred session.

Then you could compare that to the same metric from the corresponding time-range from the previous year to see how it has changed.

While this is not perfect, we think this is a reasonable metric to consider. Since the Mason core website has changed so much in the redesign, and is much more extensive now than before, the only apples-to-apples comparison we could come up with for the old and new sites is the homepage pageviews. This metric has the advantage of being independent of the absolute number of pageviews/visitors/sessions on the core website.

You can pull the numbers for the Mason homepage pageviews from:
Account: Mason Analytics Roll-Up -> Property: Rollup Property -> View: Roll-up view
Report: Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages
Filter: ^www2.gmu.edu/$|^www.gmu.edu/$ (Mason Homepage for old and new site)
Date range: October 6, 2015 through March 24, 2016 -> 2,743,280 pageviews
Date range: October 6, 2014 through March 24, 2015 -> 4,198,031 pageviews

You can pull the numbers for sessions referred from the Mason core website from:
Account: your college’s appropriate google analytics account
Report: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals
Filter: ^gmu.edu$|^www2.gmu.edu$|^admissions.gmu.edu$|^search1.gmu.edu$ (Mason core website domain for old and new site)
Date Range: October 6, 2015 through March 24, 2016, compared to previous year.

Please let us know if you think there are any concerns with this approach, if we’re missing anything, or if there are other metrics we should consider.