Code4lib Day 2: Discovering Digital Library User Behavior with Google Analytics
by Kirk Hess, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Why Google Analytics?
- free
- JavaScript based
- small tracking image (visible via Firebug) = mostly users not bots
- works across domains
- easy to integrate with existing system
- API
Some useful things in the interface:
- heat map
- content drill down – click on page and see where users went from there
- visitor flow
- events
Export Data Using API
- Analytics API
- Java or Javascript (assuming, anything actually)
- export any field into a database for further analysis (in this case MySQL db)
Analyze Data
- Which items are popular?
- How many time was an item viewed?
- Downloaded?
- Effective collection size – see if people seeing/using
- found typically, many things are not popular
- discover a lot of other things about users
Next Steps
- found, need to change site design
- change search weighting
- allow users to sort by popularity (based on previous data)
- recommender system – think Amazon
- add new tracking/new repositories
- analyze webstats – hard to look at direct access
Moving away from JavaScript based since a lot of mobile devices don’t have it.
The event analysis code has been posted on github and adding events to link code will be added later to his Github account.
