At this month’s Web Publishers’ Community session talks covered user experience; GDPR compliance in EdWeb; how to check if a Google Analytics implementation is working; and how the EdWeb cookie consent banner works.

The brave new world of European data protection laws mean that web analytics will not be a ‘GDPR-free’ zone. So I thought I’d note here what I expect to change (and remain the same) after 25 May.

Last year, I visited the Social Media Community to discuss the potential for social media analytics, and to review what we had achieved with social sharing buttons in EdWeb.

The University Website Programme have been working with University HR Services (UHRS) to improve their website and their digital communications more broadly. As part of this project, we helped the Learning and Development team make their section of the HR website easier to use and more manageable for site publishers.

I’ve decided to instate a new mailing list for University Google Analytics users. This comes as a response to a number of interface changes recently instated by Google, and feedback received from our regular training course attendees.

Google has introduced a new ‘home’ within Google Analytics to try to introduce insights from machine learning into the platform. This replaces the former starting report – Audience, Overview – and in this post, I’d like to offer my thoughts on what this change means for University of Edinburgh users.

Google Analytics Events enables a deeper understanding of in-page website behaviour. Here are some of the key things we can learn about how our users interact with our pages.

It’s simple to use trackable links, together with web analytics, to gauge the success of our campaigns – through print, email, social media or elsewhere.

The University will shortly start a procurement exercise on the University central search engine. In preparation, I recently conducted search analytics research to attempt to better understand the way our users engage with search.

At a recent Website Support Clinic, I worked with a web publisher to create dashboards in Google Analytics. Dashboards are a customisable collection of widgets where you can view a snapshot of different metrics. The web publisher was interested in viewing pageviews and unique pageviews for ECA courses in the Degree Finder. Since the URLs […]