Click here, not there. No, seriously, the link is right here. Click it. Tracking Users' Behaviors with Google Analytics: A Case Study

Tech Talks Presentation by William Hicks, March 23, 2011

Highlights

In this presentation, Will Hicks discusses and demystifies Google Analytics, a powerful tracking and reporting tool that allows web developers to gauge how their web sites are being used at a very detailed level.  Without data, we are only guessing at what people are actually doing on our sites.

The session gives an overview of Google Analytics, looking at a bit of the mechanics and then diving into the last year’s data.  There is a tiny bit of JavaScript and HTML, but not enough to sweat over.  We’ll look at lots of graphs and other stats to get an idea about what people are actually doing, not what we think or hope they are doing in either the library catalog or The Portal to Texas History.  At that point we can start to ask really hard questions such as ‘Why don’t they click on X?” or “What do they expect when they perform this action?” or “Does their location or browsing device affect their search behaviors, and how?”

About the author: Librarian William Hicks is the technology coordinator for the UNT Libraries' User Interface Unit.