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Google Analytics at Yale: Libguides Content Owner Instructions

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Metrics and Your Libguide Basic Concepts

As the content owner of a subject guide you have goals you want to achieve. 

  • Who will use this guide? This is an important question to answer. Most guides will be aimed at the local Yale community, whether undergraduates, graduate students or faculty. For a smaller number of guides, the audience may include scholars beyond Yale. Reports and dashboards on Libguides use will help you to differentiate use that happens in the Yale community versus externally. 
  • What do you want users to do after using your guide? If you provide links to digital material you will want to know if those links are used. Reports will show use of links on your guide.
  • How will you promote the guide. Note dates of classes you give. You may track if use increases after a class is given. In addition, you may create campaigns which will help to track the effectiviness of outreach efforts. See Campaigns. 

You will want to have a clear understanding of audience and goals as you start to use metrics. 

Track Use Over Time

Whenever you are looking at metrics for use of your guide you want to be aware of the time frame. It can be helpful to understand trends by comparing use of your guide in two different time periods. When looking at changes over time remember that use patterns in the library are affected by events during the semester such as holidays. There is also a trend for use to build during the semester, and then slowly decrease toward the very end of the semester. Often the fall semester sees more online activity than the spring semester. If you want to look at a comparison for how use changes over time, it is best to compare to the same period one year ago. For example, compare the third week of a semester to the third week of the same semester one year ago. 

Here is an example comparing use of the web site in the fall semester 2014 versus 2013 (2013 is in orange and is usually a lower line than 2014, indicating less use).

use graph from Google Analytics, year to year unadjusted

Note that the use shows a pattern week after week, with a trough or low use on weekends. Use is slightly higher later in the semester, except during the November recess. You might notice that the lines for each year track each other but are slightly offset. This offset is caused by the difference year to year in days of the week for September 1 to December 31. In 2014 September 1 was a Monday, in 2013 it was a Sunday. To start on the same day of the week, ths second graph is adusted to start one day later (September 2) in 2013, and to continue one day later. In addition the end of December, when Yale has a recess period is also excluded. With the adjustment to the same day of the week for start and end times makes the charts line up correctly.  

Google Analytics graph with the starting date adjusted to same day of week

If this was a graph for use of your guide, you might conclude that overall use increased in 2014. It is great that use increased, but you might want to look deeper to understand more about this use. Two areas you can examine to get a deeper understanding of use are Engagement and Audience.

Engagement 

A user session is recorded whenever someone uses your guide, whether the session lasted 1 second or 30 minutes. Someone using your page for 1 second is not getting a lot of information from the page, where someone on the page for 30 minute is more likely to really use the information on the page.Another metric that helps to measure engagement is bounce rate. A bounce is recorded when someone comes to your guide and leaves without visiting any other pages (other than the entrance page). The higher the bounce rate the lower the user engagement. You would like your pages to have a relatively long time on page and a relatively low bounce rate. Both metrics are found under Behavior and Site Content. 

engagement measures for time on page and bounce

Audience

It can be helpful to distinguish your user sessions by the types of users. One easy way to segment your audience is to look for Yale users within all users. A rough estimate for this is to use the location of New Haven. This is easily applied by changing from All Segments (at the top of the Google Analytics report) to New Haven versus all others. To do this paste this url into the address bar of your browser within Google Analytics https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=WtLQvDg6Q5uYtlBMuh-o0g

You will need to indicate that this segment should be used with the Libguides View. Once you've acitivated it you can Add Segment to your Libguides report.

list of segments with New Haven selected

Once you have selected a segment you will see two lines for all content use: one for All sessions and the other for New Haven use only. 

two sets of numbers for each page, one for all sessions and another for New Haven only

Note how different the audience can be. New Haven users make up a very small portion of users of the Film Studies Research Guide page on Themes, Subjects and Characters. 

See the Dashboard

There is a simple dashboard you may use to track the most useful metrics for your Libguide. The dashboard is available online

Use the Select LibGuide pull-down to choose your LibGuide.

dashboard for libguides

The Dashboard Sections:

In the upper left of the dashboard you will see a set of summary statistics for use of the entire guide during the time period. To the right a line graph will show changes in use over time. 

Under the summary box two pie charts are displayed. One breaks down traffic by location of New Haven and all Other traffic. The other breaks down how users found your site. You can filter the dashboard by clicking in the pie segment you are interested in. For example, click in the New Haven segment of the pie chart and all the data on the dashboard will change to show only traffic from New Haven (which is a basic approximation of Yale traffic).

To the right of the pie charts are the Referring sites: those sites which drove traffic to your guide. 

Under the pie charts is a list of every page in the guide with associated engagement metrics.

Link Events are listed at the bottom right. These are the number of clicks recorded for links on your guide pages. 

Getting Libguides' Reports from Google Analytics

These instructions will help you to access a simplified Libguides report in Google Analytics.You must have a Google Analytics account to access full reports. All library staff are eligible for an account. Contact Kathleen Bauer or Steven Wieda.

To access the Libguides customized report:

  • Sign into Google Analytics.
  • Copy and past this URL in the URL address box: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=DWzbEIirT1CoJWeJtrJAhw
  • You will be prompted to select the View you want to use the report with. Select the Libguides view.
  • The report for Libguides should display. Select the beginning and end dates you are interested in by selecting the pull down arrow and then choosing dates on the calendar .

The guide has three sections: Benchmark-All Guides, Page with Source and Page with Followed Links

Leave Benchmarks as the display of all guides data. You can use this data as a comparison.

Page with Source Tab: Pages in Your Guide and Sources

You will want to see data for your guide. First get the exact title of your guide, and then go to the second tab in your report for Page with Source.  Type the name of your guide into the search box directly above the table listing all pages.  The report should now be filtered so that you see only pages in one guide. The image below shows this display after search for the 'film studies research guide', with all the guide pages listed in descending order by the number of users for that guide page. 

list of all pages in one guide

Click on any guide page and a list of the Sources will be displayed. These represent the resource that sent people to your guide. The notation (direct) means the user may have typed the URL directly in the browser or had a bookmark. Common sources will be specific search engines such as Google. For each source the number of users, new users, average time on page and bournce rate will be listed. 

list of sources sending users to a specific guide

Page with Followed Links Tab

When a user selects a link on your guide Google Analytics records this as an Event. The category of the event is Outgoing Links. To find data about followed link events access the third tab in the report, Page with Followed Links.page were used. Click on Outlgoing Links to see a list of all followed links on your guide and how much they were used (under Total Events).