Notes

Implementing Site Search

Why Mason and Theme Pages Analytics

discussion: Standard Metrics

The Google Analyticatior plugin does two things (broadly speaking):

1) It adds the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code to your site’s pages in order to send your website’s traffic data to your Google Analytics properties, and

2) It (optionally) authenticates with google analytics in order to display some analytics reports within the WordPress dashboard. This feature means that someone doesn’t have to log-in to Google Analytics to see their website analytics data; live Google Analytics data is integrated right on the WordPress dashboard.

It was this second feature that was causing the problem. I reset the plugin and reactivated it a second time without enabling the GA dashboard integration and was able to avoid the problem.

I think the issue was due to a conflict with another plugin on this particular site. It may not be a problem on some of you other websites.

Come to think of it, you might really like this feature… perhaps you could put something like your custom Google Analytics dashboards right on your users’ WordPress dashboards so that they can’t help but see their website analytics information whenever they log-in to WordPress to work on their websites.

new view setup best practices – worksheet

volgenau has implemented GA on their dev websites and they are sending data to the roll-up!

spreadsheet of university analytics properties
fields
account/property/view name, who manages, business unit, department, bot filtering?, filter setup?

our current GA implementation
-how does our current implementation of GA work from a technical perspective?
-how does the custom JS work which implements custom GA events

options for implementing GTM
-intended to replace GA
-*may* be used in addition to GA
-in this case, GA would only be used for autotrack
-in which case GA would have to be loaded but send no pageviews by default
-options for turning off existing GA implementation

move cfa.gmu.edu property to cvpa account

spreadsheet of google analytics properties/accounts

site search
periodic snapshot of top site search terms over time
cron job of some type that captures this periodcially
perhaps using the google sheets plugin

top searches by section (i.e. top searches from admissions page vs top searches from homepage, etc.)

lower case all search terms?

who are the people doing site search the ‘old’ way (who show up on the original views despite not having the appropriate filters to capture them)

implementation issues
seor analytics not hooked up

salesforce analytics implementation

coordinating social media campaign tagging with Kathy dodd

referral exclusion list
2016-09-21: Added “gmu.edu” to referral exclusion list to prevent new sessions from being created when moving between subdomains.
So this note applies to the roll-up account.

In the context of your individual website analytics accounts, which only track your individual websites (e.g. dance, cvpa, etc.) in isolation, when a visitor starts on gmu.edu and then clicks over to cvpa.gmu.edu, you will see them in analytics as a new visitor starting a new session on cvpa.gmu.edu. Makes sense.

But in the context of the roll-up, where we are looking at someone’s entire path through the mason web ecosystem (not just isolated websites), if someone started on gmu.edu and then clicked over to cvpa.gmu.edu, we wouldn’t want to count that as a new session, because we’re treating all mason websites as one large ‘website’. If we didn’t put gmu.edu in the referral exclusion list, it would treat the click from gmu.edu to cvpa.gmu.edu as a referral, and therefore a new session. This is not what we’d want in the context of the roll-up.

The referral exclusion doesn’t prevent you from seeing that data; it just prevents it from counting as a new visit. Rather it counts it as just another pageview within the same visit.

Referral traffic research ideas
case 1 (core vs. colleges):
For everyone: mason homepage traffic vs mason referrals to college sites compared to previous period

case 2 (core):
Customs report: Mason homepage sources compared to previous period

case 3 (core):
on campus vs. off campus traffic
new vs returning (and with on vs off campus)

gtm resources
http://imscalable.com/blog/google-tag-manager/
http://www.simoahava.com/analytics/fun-with-google-tag-manager-part-1/

elements visible in viewport
https://analytics.googleblog.com/2016/08/autotrack-turns-10.html

implement this: http://www.simoahava.com/analytics/improve-data-collection-with-four-custom-dimensions/

what does the google analytics property default URL setting do?
Does it do anything other than telling GA the web root when loading pages from within GA reports?
Does it affect any calculations?

Backing up ga data
http://www.analyticsmarket.com/blog/google-analytics-backup-copy

in what business unit (custom dimension) in roll up does honors college belong?

New reports for buzz mcclean

Volgenau sites analytics
Remove GA from dev websites
Contacts:
jonathan goldman, alastair mcneil, cc greg goodman
multi tier roll-up structure