Analysis is fun
I finally set up the USGL website to use Google Analytics. I'd never bothered to do so, as most of the same information is available in the logs I already collect. Then I realized that there is a big difference between "available" and "usable". I also noticed that some of the GA reports depend on session tracking, which isn't easy for me to do on my own in my current site architecture. I do run a log analyzer that produces some interesting reports, but it doesn't do some tricks with that data that GA does, and it can't match the GA session-tracking features at all. I figure the two complement each other nicely.
So far, it's only collected one full day of data, so it's too early to tell how I will be using it in the long run. But I'm already intrigued to discover that roughly half of my visitors leave the site after viewing the first page visited, and that roughly a third each arrive on the site from search engines, links on other sites, and bookmarks or direct URL typing.
The great weakness of GA for me is that there is no obvious way to thread together the main site with the various subdomains connected to it (e.g., the library). I'm sure some of the traffic "leaving" the main site is actually going to the subdomains, and some "arrivals" from offsite are really coming from the subdomains. I'll have to see if there's a way to make GA handle this better.
So far, it's only collected one full day of data, so it's too early to tell how I will be using it in the long run. But I'm already intrigued to discover that roughly half of my visitors leave the site after viewing the first page visited, and that roughly a third each arrive on the site from search engines, links on other sites, and bookmarks or direct URL typing.
The great weakness of GA for me is that there is no obvious way to thread together the main site with the various subdomains connected to it (e.g., the library). I'm sure some of the traffic "leaving" the main site is actually going to the subdomains, and some "arrivals" from offsite are really coming from the subdomains. I'll have to see if there's a way to make GA handle this better.