Presentation from DotNetNuke World 2012, covering the topic of connecting the advanced features of Analytics to a DotNetNuke social website to capture the social activity.

1. Bruce Chapman
iFinity Software
ADVANCED GOOGLE ANALYTICS
FOR SOCIAL SITES

2. Agenda
 Aim : everyone here to go back and utilise analytics
better on their sites
 Background on Web Analytics and Social Sites
 What to measure in Social Sites
 How to measure in Social Sites
 3 Techniques for implementing tracking
 Understanding and using your data

3. Social Sites
 Social Sites : social features enabled on your
own website
 Social Features:
– Membership (friends, follow, groups)
– Activity (Q&A, Forums, Blog comments)
– Any other site-specific user interactions

4. Implementation of Social Sites with
DotNetNuke
 DotNetNuke social (6.2 or later)
 ActiveSocial
 Other custom methods and components
 Integration with other social platforms
(Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)

5. History of Web Analytics
(how did we get here)
 Early days (early 1990s): hit counting – ‘hit’
being a request for a file on a server, including
images + pages
 Hit Counters (mid 1990s) :
 Log File Analysis (early-mid 90s): after the fact
collation of data.
 Script + cookie based tracking (late 90s)
Pageview emphasis, rather than hits
 Launch of Google Analytics (2005)

6. Analytics Now
 Real time statistics
 Heatmaps, ClickTale reporting
 Mobile + desktop application analytics
 Integration with e-commerce + advertising
platforms
 Extremely widespread since Google Analytics
was made free
 Concept of Pageview losing relevance

7. Recent new Features of Google Analytics
 Switch to Asynchronous tracking
 Real-time data : see traffic as it arrives
 Webmaster tools integration
 Social Engagement reports
 Visitor Flow
 Event Tracking
 New interface (dashboards, etc)

8. How Google Analytics Asynchronous
Tracking works
 Asynchronous prevents page load from waiting
on Analytics code
 When page loads, commands are placed into a
‘_gaq’ array.
 When analytics script (ga.js) loads and runs,
loops through loaded _gaq array and executes
commands.
 Any further additions to _gaq are executed
immediately

9. Analytics and Social Sites
 Modern DotNetNuke sites have lots of client-side
operations
 Client side operations don’t trigger pageviews
 Pageviews don’t give contextual information
 External interactions (g+ links, Twitter Buttons)
don’t show up in site Analytics

10. Analytics and Social Sites cont.
 Effectiveness of a Social Site is about return
visitors and engagement with the site
 Improving the site effectiveness means
measuring success of particular actions
 Measuring Success requires measurement of
actions.
 Pageviews alone will not provide enough
information

11. Tracking on-page interactions with Events
 Events are a relatively new Analytics feature
Visit
Pageview
Events

12. Google Analytics Events
 Events can have three variables supplied:
– Category
– Label
– Value
.. in addition to the event name or ‘Action’
 Each user session is limited to 500 requests
(events + page views)
 Events are integrated into Analytics Reporting

13. Viewing Events in Analytics

14. Viewing Events in Analytics (2)

15. Using Events to Measure Effectiveness
 Measuring effectiveness is
measuring goals against targets
 Traditional Pageview based (Url)
goals are clunky
 Event goals can measure how much
a visitor is engaged

16. Using Goals and Conversions
 Ideas for Goals:
– Friends made / Follows clicked
– Comments – blogs / walls / forum posts
– Groups Joined
– Downloads
– External Links followed

17. How to Track Events in DotNetNuke sites
 3 Methods
1. Add specific event tracking code to pages
2. Associate clicks to event tracking function
3. Use event-enabled Analytics Plugin
 Skill level : copy/paste – if you can add
Analytics code, you can add event tracking

18. 1. Add specific event tracking code
 Assuming Analytics already configured for
Asynchronous tracking
 Use code snippet directly in Html using
javascript
 Tracks an event called ‘Something’ for the
‘Social’ category, using ‘A1’ as a label

19. 2. Associate Clicks with event tracking
 If you can’t directly control html, then use jQuery
to assign click handler to elements on the page
 Recommend using the ‘on’ handler as content
might be AJAX loaded, and click needs to be
bound

20. 3. Using event-enabled Analytics Plugin
 iFinity Google Analytics 3.0 – free Analytics
plugin
 Now updated with event tracking
 Use ‘identifying’ mode, click on things to track
 Associate Category, Event name and optional
Label or jQuery selector
 Test event tracking by using click testing
 Code works by associating handler with clickable
elements, and recording matching events

21. Analytics Module Demo

22. Analytics Module Advantages
 Integrated external links reporting
 Setup tracking across entire portal, or for specific
page
 Consistency of Category/Event naming
 No need to write Javascript code, but option of
including site / page level custom Javascript for
extra tracking (events, custom vars, etc)

23. Tracking External Social Interactions
 Tracking clicks + interactions with External social
sites (LinkedIn, g+, Facebook, etc)
 Slightly modified version of Event tracking
_gaq.push(['_trackSocial', network, socialAction,
opt_target, opt_pagePath]);
See Google Analytics Help for more examples

24. Understanding and using your Data
 Move beyond ‘visits’ to ‘interactions’ in
measuring data
 Determine what is a conversion
 Use analysis of existing conversions to
determine
 Think in terms of goal funnels – ‘gates’ that
visitors must go through before conversion
 Don’t forget to track from point of view of
anonymous visitor to regular contributor
 Visits triggering events can be used as a
segment

25. Create Custom Segments from Event Data
 Custom Segments created from Event data
 Use to track/compare actions where
event was completed

26. Viewing Data by Custom Segment
 Showing activity of visits to /Licensing page
 Licence Requests vs All Visits

27. Key things to Analyse
 Acquisition (paid/organic/other)
 Activity (pageviews/events -> see vs do)
 Outcome (bounce/conversion/browsing session)
 Reduce down to a value/visit metric  increase
visitors, increase value (revenue / leads / other)

28. Example Goals for Social Sites
 Signup (register) completion
 Forum Post
 Group Join
 Profile Update
 Friends Made

29. Conclusions
 Social Site success depends on visitor
interaction + repeat visits
 Interaction + repeat visits depend on social
activity
 Therefore, measuring social activity, and using
that data to improve is vital to site success
 DotNetNuke has great social features but these
can’t be measured by pageview, due to ‘single
page’ interactive design
 Integrate Event Tracking with your Social
Features to understand your social activity
 Use Events to segment visitor data

30. Questions?
 Google Analytics 3.0 module install available at
https://dnngoogleanalytics.codeplex.com/
 Slides available at
http://www.slideshare.net/brchapman