Web Analytics

Analytics can help you better understand how your users interact with you site. Insights you gain can help inform development of meaningful, durable and easy-to-navigate websites. 

Getting Started

If your website uses an official Cal Poly template, you already have Cal Poly’s official Google Analytics script installed on your site. If not, reach out to web-comms@calpoly.edu for information on how to install the script. 

Which Pages Do Your Visitors Visit?

Invest in the pages that most users visit most often. Where possible, aim to develop fewer, better pages on a site and direct users to these. It’s also beneficial for a subdomain to have a feed of fresh content such as a regularly maintained blog, updates or news section.

Treemap Graph

Consider each of your top pages as a landing page. On a treemap graph, these popular pages will appear as bigger, brighter squares. Your news site or blog posts will display as very small squares, so it’s useful to group them by path (e.g. the nested subfolder structure) to show the visibility of your blog as a whole.

What content are your visitors looking for?

What do visitors to your site want and expect from it? One clue comes to us in the form of the keywords people use to find your site’s content. 

Streamgraph

Looking at search interest over time reveals trends in user desires and expectations. It’s important to consider context like seasonality in this data. It is sometimes useful to group data like spelling errors and synonyms. 

This is a graph of recent search queries for www.calpoly.edu importing data from Google Search Console, displayed with Google Data studio.

Search data is also available using Google Search Console directly, though without the faceted stacked bar charting offered by Google Data studio.

Quick Win: Shorten Long Page titles 

When a page title is too long, the user sees a truncated version. Very long page titles appear messy and unintentional. Consider approaches for writing more concise page titles without sacrificing meaning. Remember, the title is not the only place for text about a page — you can write decorative text and messaging on the page as well.