From Black Hole to Goldmine Putting Analytics in the Portal Martin Morrey, University of Edinburgh

Our Trajectory In a Perfect Universe Inside The Black Hole To The Event Horizon GOLD! Lets Go Mining What Next Summary

In a perfect universe… From Black Hole to Gold Mine June 4, 2013

Your university has a portal

WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR PORTAL? Please write a user story In your groups On a card Online participants By tweeting with #edu13 #bh

Story should contain… WHO WHAT WHY

Card Example WHO As a student communications officer, I want to know which announcements are the most popular with students each month, so I can improve the quality and uptake of our communications with students WHAT WHY

What have we got? Have you completed your card? Have you Tweeted? Tweets for #edu13 #bh

Prioritise Put sticky dots on stories you think are: Most useful Most important

Inside the black hole

The Black Hole of User Tracking Portal User activity Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

What we had… Server-side logging We could find out: How many users logged-in Some idea of roles (student, staff…) What customisations are made BUT that was about it!

“Black Holes Ain’t So Black” Go client side: It’s where the users are! Google Analytics: Quick Familiar Free!

Escaping the Page Singularity The default unit of tracking in Google Analytics is…? …the page BUT Page Views are little use: In our portal, pages ≡ tabs We are most interested in channels A tab contains multiple channels

The event horizon

Client1: Google Analytics Events Code attached to a user interaction Link click Button click… Use to record interactions with our channels, BUT: ~200 channels Using a range of technologies All to be coded separately

Client2: Apply the events in client Use jQuery to: Add click event to every link and button displayed After page has rendered Covers everything user sees: Portal interface Portlets Proxied content…

Page Rendered

Events Added, +0.1s

GOLD!

Seeking Nuggets… WHAT is used? WHO is using it? MORE Name of channel + links, buttons, controls clicked Navigation WHO is using it? Applicants, staff, students… Organisational unit, Degree Programme MORE Errors, performance, geographic…

What GOLD

GA Events (WHAT) Google Analytics Events have 3 key properties: Category "Navigation", "Channel-Use", "Error",… Action Name of the tab, channel… Label Text / URL of link

Results: Top Categories

Channel-Use Actions

Announcements Labels

Who GOLD From Black Hole to Gold Mine June 4, 2013

GA Custom Variables (WHO) Attach persistent attributes to user Key-Value pair, recorded with event Maximum of 5 Used to segment our results From Black Hole to Gold Mine June 4, 2013

Custom Variable 1:MyEdRole June 4, 2013 From Black Hole to Gold Mi

"Event Booking" Segmented

more GOLD (optional)

Visits by Distance Learners

Visits by Applicants

Visits by Alumni

Announcements Error Events

Lets go mining

Lets Build a report Taking our favourite story/stories Lets choose a: metric dimension way to segment users

Way forward (optional)

What We're Doing With It Now Potential for: Input into a portal restructuring exercise Priorities for mobile Reports to channel owners, projects GA “Intelligence” for early warnings Potential for: Dashboards for channel/tab owners Library, Careers, Alumni services

More Analytics Solutions Pwik Open source Access to raw data ->deeper analysis Better real-time reporting Google "Universal Analytics" Custom dimensions and metrics (20!) Tracking configured from web console

summary From Black Hole to Gold Mine June 4, 2013

Escape Complete Using a client application of Google Analytics we can: Track any link or button displayed to the user Build meaningful reports on portal usage Segment by up to 5 attributes of user/context Portal analytics provides useful info for: Service management and improvement Owners of individual portal channels

Gold miners required! Martin.Morrey@ed.ac.uk @martinmorrey Web Integration Manager Applications Division, Information Services, University of Edinburgh + 44 131 651 5233