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.
Learning (Lib)Tech 