In November 2010 members of the Division of Communications and Development attended a training day focused on the use of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a useful tool for investigating how visitors find your website, and what they do when they get there. However, it is unable to provide explanations for why they visited your site, or for the journey they took through it.
Topics that were covered on the day included:
- How Google Analytics tracks visitors’ arrival and journey through your site, including initial and return visits.
- Using the calendar to compare visits to your website, across various time periods.
- Metrics – the quantitative measures used to analyse visitor interactions with your site (such as visits, pageviews, time on page, and bounce rate).
- Dimensions – characteristics of a visitor or page that can be used to organise metrics, such as region where you could compare the visits to your site from “North America” vs “Europe”.
- How to filter Google Analytics data so that they correspond to specific URLs that lie under your homepage.
- Sources of traffic to your site – direct traffic, referring sites such as Facebook, and search engines such as Google.
- Identifying where your visitors are from, and the languages, browsers and operating systems they use, thus allowing you to improve their visitor experience.
If you are a site owner and are interested in looking at the Google Analytics data for your web pages, please email Peter Gillings, who will be able to set up access and instruct you in the basics.
Please note that you will need to set up a Google Account using your Imperial email address.
