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Digital Champions

Session 11: Using analytics to understand your site visitors!

10.24.2021

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GUEST SPEAKER

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Mr. Doug Ransaw

Embroidery Vector Solutions

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Start-of-session questions

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https://menti.com

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Analytics

  • Last week -> Started learning about user behavior
    • Which things they find easy, which they find hard
    • How they think when they explore our sites
  • This week -> How can we learn more about how our visitors as a group?

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What are analytics?

  • Tools that let you understand what users do when they visit your site
  • Answer questions like
    • How many different visitors do I have each day?
    • How much time does the average visitor spend on my site?
    • How many people discover my website by clicking on it in my Instagram profile?
  • We can do this with any site that we make (and we will today!)

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ACTIVITY

Let’s add analytics to our sites!

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Here we go!

analytics.google.com -> Let’s start measuring!

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  • Enter something like “<site topic> analytics” for the Account name
  • For example, if your site is about Covid awareness, you could enter “Covid awareness analytics”
  • Uncheck all four boxes
  • Hit next!

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  • You also have to create a “property name”
  • This can just be the name of your site (like “covid awareness”)

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  • Choose a category that fits your site’s topic
  • Choose “small” for business size
  • Check the first box under the last question (as shown here)

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Click “Create” and agree to the Terms of Service

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Uncheck all these boxes, then hit Save

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Click “Web” under “Choose a platform”

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  • Enter the url of your site! (it probably ends in .weebly.com)
  • Also enter the name of your site (again like “covid awareness”)

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Now that you’ve created your “stream”, click Global Site Tag (gtag.js) under “Tagging instructions”

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Click the “copy” button to copy your special tracking code!

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Now to Weebly...

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Paste your tracking code here

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PUBLISH

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Back to Analytics!

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In another tab, visit your site and scroll/click around.

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Then switch to Analytics to watch the data roll in!

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USING ANALYTICS INFO

Mobile vs. Desktop/Tablet

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Users on different devices

  • Which devices do users visit our site with?
  • Look at your analytics report and compare “Mobile Traffic” to “Tablet and Desktop Traffic”
    • Mobile Traffic → Visitors on their phones
    • Tablet/Desktop Traffic → People on things like iPads or computers
  • Let’s compare these to think about why members of these two groups do different things on the site!

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Mobile vs. Desktop: How many of each?

  • Which type of device do most users visit our site on?
  • Can we guess what this is happening?
  • Should we change something based on this? What?

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Mobile vs. Desktop: Length of session

  • Session → A user’s visit to the site
  • Avg. Session Duration → Estimate of how long a user spends on the site when they visit
  • Questions to think about:
    • Between mobile and desktop/tablet users, which group spends the most time on the site?
    • Why do you think this is?
    • What might we change about our site now that we know this?
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Mobile vs. Desktop: Different countries

  • How do visitors from different countries compare?
  • Which country has more mobile visitors?
  • Why do you think this is? How should we respond?

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USING ANALYTICS INFO

“Direct” vs. “Search”

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How do users come to my site?

  • Some users know the address of the site
  • Others discover it by searching (say, with Google)
  • It can be interesting to look at how these groups behave differently on your site
    • “Direct” traffic → Users who type the URL to get here
    • “Search” traffic → Users who searched and found the site

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Direct vs. Search: “Bounce rate”

  • “Bounce rate” → How many users visit only one page on the site?
  • Lots of “bounces” can be a sign that user aren’t interested
  • Questions to think about:
    • Which group has more bounces?
    • Why do you think this is?
    • What might we change about our site now that we know this?

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Exploring the Realtime view

  • Visit your site on your phone -> Where does this data appear in the Realtime view in Analytics?
  • Visit different pages on your site (if you have more than one) -> Can you find where these different page visits are logged in Analytics?
  • Perform a sequence of clicks, page views, scrolling, etc. on your site, then click this:

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