Google Analytics Connector
Digest
Concept
Viewing Analytics Data
When in a Site where a Google Analytics Connector is enabled, an Analytics tab will appear on the Home Area Dashboard. The Dashboard Analytics view provides overall Site analytics which includes pageviews, visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate and average time on site.
A percentage change for each value is displayed in parenthesis. A percentage change that is green signifies a favorable change and red one signifies an unfavorable change. For example, because having more site visitors is favorable; a positive percentage change in the number of visitors will be displayed in green and a negative change will be red. However, having a higher bounce rate is unfavorable; therefore, a positive percentage change in bounce rate will be red and a negative change will be green.
Below the overall Site analytics is a list of URLs that can be toggled to display either URLs with the highest number of page views or URLs with the highest bounce rate. These URLs are grouped by base url, meaning query parameters are dropped from each URL when determining which URLs refer to the same page. A group of URLs is displayed as the base URL with either the sum of all pageviews for URLs in the group or an average of the bounce rates of each URL in the group. Clicking the plus icon to the left of the base URL will reveal the individual URLs comprising the group. The expanded list of URLs will include request parameters. Clicking the Show more link will load additional URLs (not all URLs will be displayed when first clicking the plus icon).
The 'Visit Google Analytics' link located below the list of URLs will take the user to the Profile Overview page in the Google Analytics web application for the profile specified on the Google Analytics Connector.
When a Google Analytics Connector is enabled, each Page, File, and Folder will have a new pane available on the View tab labelled Analytics. This pane provides individual statistics for the Asset. Folder analytics will include a section for aggregate analytics data for the folder contents.
The 'Visit Google Analytics' link located below the asset analytics will take the user to the Content Drilldown or Content Detail section in the Google Analytics web application for the current asset.
Analytics for a single page
Aggregate analytics for a folder's contents
Technical
Creating a Google Analytics Connector
- Go to Administration -> Connectors
- Click on New Connector
- Select Google Analytics then Submit.
- Enter a System Name and select a Parent Container.
- Optionally enter a value for the Base Path field.
The Base Path is a path segment that is removed from URLs imported from Google Analytics to help Cascade determine which asset corresponds to a particular URL. An example of when the Base Path could be used is when a Site in Cascade corresponds to a sub-folder off of a particular domain. For instance an athletics Site might be published to www.myuniversity.edu/athletics. In Cascade, there is no "athletics" folder because it is represented by a Site. The URLs coming from Google Analytics, however, look like "/athletics/index.html". In order for Cascade to be able to match the URL to a particular Page inside Cascade, it would need to know that "/athletics" should be removed from the URL in order to successfully locate the matching Page "index". - For the Google Analytics Profile ID field, enter the Profile ID of the Profile you wish to pull data from in Google Anaytics . This is different than the web property (UA-XXXXXX-X). See the "Finding the Google Analytics Profile ID" section below.
- Submit the new Connector.
Verifying the Google Analytics Connector
The Connector needs to be verified with Google. The verification process is similar to Twitter Connector verification.
- On the View tab, click Verify.
- A new link should appear that says Click here to allow and "Verify" again. The link will open a new window/tab to Google to verify Cascade Server access to the Google Analytics account. If not logged in, enter account credentials which have access to the profile. Click Grant Access.
- Now that Cascade has access to the Google Analytics account, go back to the Connector window and click the original Verify link again.
- The Google Analytics connector is now enabled. To manually synchronize the Analytics data, click the link labeled as Click to manually import analytics data. Otherwise, no Analytics data will be available until next automatic synchronization which will occur at 1:30 am.
Finding the Google Analytics Profile ID
If using the new interface:
- Log in to Google Analytics
- Locate the Profile in the "Account Home" area of the Dashboard
- When the profile, loads the Profile ID is number following the letter 'p' in the last path segment of the URL. The Profile ID has been highlighted in bold in the example below:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/#management/Property/aNNNNwNNNNNNpNNNNNNNN/
We're not sure why Google decided to hide this information in the new user interface.)
If using the old interface:
- Log in to Google Analytics
- Locate the Profile in the "Website Profiles" table
- Click the Edit link in the "Actions" column
- On the Edit screen, the Profile ID is at the top, directly under the Profile Settings heading
Additional information
- Every day at 1:30 am, site analytics data will be imported from Google Analytics for each verified Google Analytics Connector in the system.
- URLs that have the same base but differing query strings will be grouped together under the same asset. For example, a Page in Cascade named "search" is published as "search.html". When a visitor uses the search page on the live site, the resulting URL is "search.html?term=looking-for-things". Google Analytics treats this URL as being different from "search.html" or "search.html?term=looking-for-something-else". Cascade Server will group these 3 URLs under the "search" Page Asset (see screenshot above).
- The Google Analytics Connector must be verified before viewing analytics data on the Dashboard or individual assets. Analytics data will no longer appear when the Connector is deleted or unverified.
- Deleting a Google Analytics Connector removes all analytics data associated with that Connector.
- To learn how to add a tracking code to your pages, please see Google's documentation.