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LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee
The LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee is dedicated to collaborative exploration of technologies that further the CUNY libraries’ missions. Through workshops, hack days, demoes, and other meetings, CUNY librarians learn new skills from each other and cultivate a community of openness, sharing, and encouragement.
Admins:
Event tracking with Google Analytics
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Funny you should ask! I just set this up for our library website.
Currently, we are tracking clicks only (as the event actions), focusing on the homepage’s elements.
- Category: tab box
- Labels for everything: “Databases dropdown – articles,” “OneSearch button – books,” “Help – media,” etc.
- The “- books” denotes which tab it’s in, since the Drupal module doesn’t let me add the tracking code to the tab titles
- Category: quick links
- Labels for every link
- Category: ribbon (grey bar)
- Labels for every link
- Category: homepage other
- Labels for site search, social media icons, hours link
Our event tracking has only been up for two days. I’m meeting with our library’s Web Committee next week, and with their help I’ll refine our events tracking schema.
These categories will answer some questions about how users behave on our site. E.g.: From our homepage’s books tab, what’s the split between off-campus users who look for books in OneSearch vs. CUNY+? Which of the two Research Guides links should we keep? And, overall, we’ll know more about how users leave the site, since outbound links aren’t tracked except through events.
These are all manually added tracking codes, btw — I don’t have the guts to dive into Google Tag Manager. Here’s how our tracked links look:
And here’s how it shows up in the Google Analytics view:
I’m curious to know what other folks are up to!
Thanks, @robincamille! That gave me some ideas that I’m testing out on our Faculty services page. I think that thinking strategically about the scheme of categories and events is going to be a big deal for me, as the choices you make define the kinds of reporting you can get out of GA. The thing I’m wrestling with is how global a category might be and how global an event might be. If you make the event label too granular, it makes it harder to aggregate data across your site. But if you make the event label too global, you may make the category labels to hard to aggregate. It’s that classic problem of classification: lump or split.
For anyone following along with this thread, I highly recommend a great community of librarians who are interested in user experience that have found a home in Slack. Anyone can join. To get started, go to http://libux.herokuapp.com/
By “librarian,” I should note that I’m using that term very loosely, as the community includes people who work in libraries (in various positions), higher ed, and companies that provide systems and services to libraries. It’s a great bunch of people that share a TON of ideas and resources.
Years ago I setup event tracking for eResources. It didn’t become useful until recently, when we converted all our proxied links to shortened URLs. It’s much easier to see what databases are being clicked on.
- Category: tab box
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