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From Black Hole to Goldmine

- Putting Analytics in the Portal

Martin Morrey, University of Edinburgh

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Our Trajectory

In a Perfect Universe

Inside The Black Hole

To The Event Horizon

GOLD!

Lets Go Mining

What Next

Summary

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In a perfectuniverse… 

June 4, 2013From Black Hole to Gold

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Your university has a portal

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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

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Story should contain… 

WHO

WHAT

WHY

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Card Example

 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

WHO

WHAT

WHY

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What have we got?

Have you completed your card?

Have you Tweeted?

Tweets for #edu13 #bh 

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Prioritise

Put sticky dots on stories you think are: Most useful

Most important

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Inside the black hole

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Portal

User 

activity

The Black Hole of User Tracking

Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

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• 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!

What we had… 

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“Black Holes Ain’t So Black” 

Go client side:

• It’s where the users are! 

Google Analytics:

• Quick

• Familiar• Free!

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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 

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The event horizon

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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

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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… 

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Page Rendered

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Events Added, +0.1s

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GOLD!

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Seeking Nuggets… 

WHAT is used? Name of channel + links, buttons, controls clicked

Navigation

WHO is using it?

 Applicants, staff, students… 

Organisational unit, Degree Programme

MORE

Errors, performance, geographic… 

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What GOLD

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GA Events (WHAT)

Google Analytics Events have 3 keyproperties:

Category 

"Navigation", "Channel-Use", "Error",…

 Action

Name of the tab, channel… 

Label 

Text / URL of link

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Results: Top Categories

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Channel-Use Actions

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Announcements Labels

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Who GOLD

June 4, 2013From Black Hole to Gold

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GA Custom Variables (WHO)

 Attach persistent attributes to user  Key-Value pair, recorded with event 

Maximum of 5

Used to segment our results

June 4, 2013From Black Hole to Gold

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Custom Variable 1:MyEdRole

June 4, 2013 From Black Hole to Gold Mi

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"Event Booking" Segmented

Segment

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more GOLD(optional)

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Visits by Distance

Learners

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Visits by Applicants

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Visits by Alumni

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Announcements Error Events

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Lets go mining

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Lets Build a report

Taking our favourite story/stories

Lets choose a:

metric 

dimension 

way to segment users

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Way forward(optional)

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What We're Doing With It

Now 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

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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

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summary

June 4, 2013From Black Hole to Gold

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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

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Gold miners required!

Martin.Morrey@ed.ac.uk @martinmorrey

Web Integration Manager  Applications Division, Information Services, University of 

Edinburgh

+ 44 131 651 5233