Google Analytics Workshop at HighEdWeb 2009

[Seth Meranda]

I'll be leading this workshop on Sunday before the conference. I intend to do a thorough breakout of GA, and how to use it effectively for higher ed.

I'd love to hear from anyone who is attending; let me know what school/company you are with, and what you look forward to learning. Is there anything specifically you want me to get into?

Reply to this post, or shoot me an email: smeranda2unl.edu.

I'm looking forward to another great conference!

[Dan Demmons]

Hi Seth,
Just saw your post.
We're in the beginning stages of a complete redesign of our site here at Providence College, and we plan on using Google Analytics to help us make informed decisions on what direction the site needs to go in.
I've dabbled a tiny bit with it on personal sites, but I'd be interested in learning whatever you can show me about it- tips, tricks, english translation interpretation of the data, how it relates to our sites and then, how to act on the data. So, basically if you can dump your brain onto a flash drive, that would be great! :)
Thanks,
-Dan Demmons
Providence College
Web Developer

[Patrick Powers]

Yes, and please make copies of said brain on flash drive.

We installed Google Analytics a while ago and feel a little overwhelmed. We'd like to know how to streamline reports so as to better informed decisions going forward.

Thanks,

Patrick Powers
Webster University

[April Taulbee]

Hey Seth,

We have used Google Analytics for the last few years and are also getting ready to redesign. My request pretty much mirrors Dan's. ;-)

April Taulbee,
Webmaster
D'Youville College

[Ron Page]

Hi Seth,

I'm from Arizona State University and I'm interested in tracking usage by user attributes, e.g. role, organization/department, location, etc. Is individual user tracking possible/desirable?

We've implemented Google Analytics in several apps, most recently using a Drupal module but it's time to start doing more than the vanilla tracking.

For me, I'd be interested in high-level overview of what is possible, down to details on how to implement role/attribute based tracking and creating custom reports. I'll probably end up getting one of the books, so a recommendation there would be helpful too. Thanks.

--
Ron

[Carey Miller]

We've been using google analytics for a couple years now and there are a ton of different reports available. I guess what I'm most interested in is, if you had to choose the top 4-5 reports to show to a web management committee each month, which reports would you choose? If you've got a limited amount of time to give a brief overview of the state of the site to an audience of varying levels of analytics expertise (in a way that makes sense to them :), do you know of any higher ed standards / common practices that apply?

Thanks,

Carey Miller
Webmaster
Northwest College

[Chris Siems]

The Texas A&M IT department has 10+ sites running Analytics. We're still comparing it to Awstats and NetTracker for ROI on campaigns. The university's Marketing and Communications department operates a Google Search Appliance; they'll be at HighEdWeb too.

We'd like to take know how to integrate Analytics with Search and maybe some of the more advanced topics - Goals, Custom Reporting.

Chris Siems
Texas A&M University, Computing and Information Services
Software Applications Developer
twitter: teamsiems
[e-mail]

[Steve McConnell]

I'd like to learn more efficient ways to do things I already do in a somewhat cumbersome fashion -- track traffic sources, both aggregate and for specific pages; create regular reports (how much can be automated?); use the site overlay. Some definitions of terms also would be helpful (exit vs. bounce, visit vs. pageview, organic vs. referral vs. direct).

Also, can website profiles be transferred from one Google account to another? I set up ours on an individual account, and would like to have them owned instead by a departmental email address, in order to share management duties. But I don't want to lose the historical traffic data.

~ Steve McConnell
Web news editor, UC Berkeley

[Simon Dorfman]

Hello Seth,
I'd like to learn how to use google analytics with email campaigns. I vaguely remember reading something about adding "?_something" at the end of the links in the email to track how many people are reaching a page via the special email link. I think I read that over here somewhere: http://yoast.com/cat/analytics/ (I used to do a lot more wordpress development before working at Tulane).
Thanks,
Simon

[Simon Dorfman]

Seth, your workshop today was awesome, thanks!
Please ask your developer to open source the extra stuff you added to lilurl on go.unl.edu
And please ask him to let me know where he publishes his code when he does. simon at tulane edu
Thanks!