Google Analytics

Accessing analytics

Why two analytics? (actually three)

Google Analytics (GA) was first on the scene, then came Google Search Console (GSC). You have the ability to access GSC data from GA, however do so with care, query data is not exactly the same.

In GA, despite being in a view for a specific area, you will receive queries for the whole college, landing pages however do filter properly to just the view. 

For query data filtered to your unit, be sure to use GSC.

GA has two types of tracking, Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

With UA set to retire on July 1, 2023 we have set GA4 to track on sites in addition to UA. To tell them apart, we are using GA4 in the names of properties that are the newer GA4.

Analytics accounts vs. properties

Think of an account simply as a bucket that holds properties, each property does the tracking on a site. We made accounts for major units in CEHD in May 2022 and moved unit properties into those accounts.

CEHD-Kin for example is for the School of Kinesiology and the properties for all of the Kin lab sites are under that account. While permission can be granted by property, it is more efficient to give access to the account which in turn allows access to all properties in the account.

Filters (only for UA)

Filters can be created to help you better manage the huge amount of data that Google Analytics provides. In many cases, you will want to create an entirely new profile specifically for your filter in order to not lose the filtered data.

New profiles do not retrieve data previously collected through our Google Analytics account. In other words, they will only give you stats from their creation date onward. And the same goes for filters; they do not apply retroactively, but only to new traffic data.

A Grain of Salt

While Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring the success of your pages and determining what changes should be made, you’ll want to keep in mind that it’s best when used in the context of trends rather than a short term view of the data.

Unless you are measuring a specific campaign, you usually want to consider a span of several months before actually making changes based on the analytics.