Analyze your Evoq Website with Google Analytics Integration and improve the success of your Content
GA is Great
Google Analytics is a great product and a lot of site owners, content editors and marketers have voted by integrating it with their web properties. In fact, the BuitWith Analytics Trend report says there are over 27 million sites using Google Analytics. Google Analytics has always been very popular with Evoq installations because of the simplicity in using the GA Connector to set up the tracking. It’s the unquestioned market leader for Web Analytics – market dominance created by a combination of price (free!) and combination of features (too many to list).
But, GA is not so Good
When Evoq 9 was being built, the DNN team listened to the feedback from customers and decided to implement a deep integration with the Google Analytics product. Many customers gave us detailed feedback, which I can paraphrase as:
“We use Google Analytics but it’s hard to show new content editors how to find the performance of their content”
“Google Analytics is great but I don’t spend enough time looking into the reports”
“I understand what the charts are telling me, but it doesn’t tell me where I should be looking”
“It takes a long time to go through various reports to get a picture for how a specific page is performing, and you have to repeat that for each page you want to check”
What became clear to us was that people who spend their time creating content liked the information available from Google Analytics, but it can be hard to manage all the various user accounts, reports and data for people who need access to the data but aren’t analytics gurus.
Leveraging the Great, and fixing the Not-So-Good
The Evoq Analytics solution is the answer to the questions and feedback customers gave us.
Analytics in Evoq 9 works by integrating in with your Google Analytics account for sending and receiving data. The sending of data works as before by adding the tracking code to all the pages in your site. The receiving of data works by our Evoq Analytics service reading your Google Analytics account to assemble reports, interactive tables and graphics specifically designed to give you the precise insights you need to maximize the outcomes of your sites.
There are two categories of reports in Analytics:
1. Site Analytics : this provides top-level data and insights into how your overall site is performing
2. Page Analytics : page-level data and insights for a specific page.
When you need to understand the effectiveness of your strategies for your whole site, you can go straight to Site Analytics. If you’re working on a specific piece of content (just like this blog post!) you can see how effective you have been.
Analysis of your Site Traffic and Conversions with Site Analytics
The Site Analytics Dashboard has multiple sections, each with a specific purpose.
Summary data for the big picture
In the Summary section, the Evoq Analytics service mines your GA data for interesting insights you should be aware of. Fresh insights are found and shown each day, helping you to keep track of important changes with your site traffic, conversions and engagement.
The Summary section also contains the ‘Top Fives’ reports. This presents a quick summary of important aspects which you can scan quickly. The top 5 categories include Conversions, Engagement, Channels, Campaigns and site Entrances and Exits. The color-coded sparklines quickly show what is going well and where attention is required.
Conversions Data for the bottom line
Most sites are designed to provide some type of conversion, whether an e-commerce sale, customer enquiry, community engagement or another measure. The Conversions section shows the important aspects of Conversions across the site. Constructing custom Google Analytics reports to pull this level of detail into one page is virtually impossible, but in Evoq you can not only find it, you can interact with and perform analysis on the data.
The Evoq Analytics Conversion reports shows the trends, specific conversions insights and sources of conversions. Using the insights you’ll soon learn where your site is working and where it is not.
Site Traffic for site Content Performance
No Analytics solution is complete without knowing the raw numbers of visitors, page views and sessions – along with the trends of each. The Traffic section provides all the numbers you expect to find and pulls out the key traffic trend measures to help quantify the changes over time.
Traffic insights helps to find and understand the key up, down and winning content in the site. The insights help to answer the questions you may forget to ask yourself, such as ‘which pages in my site have lost the most traffic recently? Do I have a problem somewhere?’ – the combination of insights with site traffic trends helps find the key moves within the overall picture of the site trend.
Page Analytics for Specific Content Performance
As a content contributor to this site, I confess to being interested in my own content contributions. I like to see how many people are reading, and where people go to after they have read a blog post. One of the difficulties in analysing content performance in Google Analytics is finding and filtering the data for a specific page amongst all pages in the site. Evoq Analytics solves that issue by showing a range of page and content performance data a single click away.
Page Analytics shows the traffic, conversion, entrance/exit and engagement data directly in a single dashboard. You don’t have to track down or filter for that page – just visit Page Analytics on the page you’re on, and you’ll get the data. This works for Evoq pages as well as other content pages such as blog entries, community contributions such as discussions, and even for third-party extensions like e-commerce catalogues.
One of the areas where customers told us they were having problems was with extending Google Analytics to capture more of what their visitors were doing once they were on a page. This is becoming increasingly important as application design trends towards Single Page Applications (SPA) instead of showing a small piece of functionality on separate pages.
Page Analytics increases tracking of engagement via Events. This is built into the product and can be enabled at the Evoq Page level. Once page tracking is enabled, you’ll get outbound click tracking, scroll analysis, form submission tracking and an extensible system for tracking clicks for call-to-actions, interactions and more. All without writing a single line of javascript or needing to develop a custom report. All of the data can be filtered by different dimensions, which will show only the numbers for the filtered dimension value.
4 Steps to Leveraging Evoq Analytics for Success
‘What gets measured gets improved’ is a truism that applies to content as much as anything. By now, it should be obvious where the integration with Google Analytics in Evoq Content & Evoq Engage provides benefits for individuals or teams working with content on a frequent basis. Here’s a recipe for improved performance with your Evoq install by leveraging the built-in Analytics:
1) Make sure you have the Connector configured correctly
2) Go through the process of setting up some Conversions to measure
3) Check your Site Analytics Insights daily or at least weekly, and follow up on items that need action.
4) View and understand Page Analytics when creating and editing content
Correct Google Analytics Connector Configuration
Check the blog post Integrating Google Analytics with Evoq for the correct procedure on configuring your Evoq install to use Google Analytics.
You can test that the integration is working by checking your Google Analytics account directly to see if data is being sent (look at the Real Time data), and by opening the Site Analytics page to see the data is being retrieved. There is a delay between when data is sent to the Google Analytics servers and when it is available for viewing in reports.
Configuring your Google Analytics Account to measure Conversions
A conversion is something important happening on your site – visitors completing something that you want them to achieve. Every site should have a conversion of some sort, even if it is just to get visitors to view an average of 3 pages per visit. The GA integration in Evoq generates Google Analytics Events you can use for Conversions, such as recording user Registrations and Form Submits.
See [setting up Conversion Tracking with goals in Google Analytics for an in-depth discussion of how to create some conversions for your site to measure.
Once the conversions are set up, the data will start to flow into the Page and Site Analytics dashboards automatically.
Checking your Site Analytics Insights for Action Items
The Site Analytics feature works by mining your GA data looking for interesting information to report back. Sometimes you’ll already be aware of this information. Other times it may be a surprise to you and worthy of further investigation.
You might find that a particular campaign or site has stopped referring visitors, or that your search traffic has dropped. You may discover that a specific blog post had a very large increase in traffic – all of these things are worthy of further investigation. Insights related to specific pages link directly to that page where you delve further into the Page Analytics.
If you have found that Conversions have decreased, use the Segmentation table in the Site Analytics Conversion section, and try viewing the data in different dimensions. Here the Conversions have been segmented by the Device Type dimension, which is showing that the desktop and mobile traffic is converting at around the same rate, but few people are visiting the site using tablets.
Using Page Analytics to understand Content Performance
When assessing Content Performance at the page level, it’s important to have the contextual understanding of what the purpose of the page is. It might be a landing page for a campaign, a specifically crafted SEO landing page, a blog post, a signup for a conference – each piece of content is different.
If the page has direct conversions (conversions that take place on the page itself) then you will get good insights by segmenting the Page Metrics table. The Source, Channel and Campaign dimensions will give good insights into which of these perform the best.
If page interaction is more important, the Page Interaction Events table will be useful. You can see links which are being clicked, or what the average scroll percent for the page is. This will help you to understand if your content is being effective.
The Visitor Flow diagram gives important clues both to how well current traffic strategies are working, but can also reveal what is not working. If you have a blog post that is not receiving search engine referrals in the top 10, you may want to investigate if the post is ranking well for any terms. If the Site Exit is the highest action for the page (also check the Rankings Box) then you are leaking visitors at this point and should pay attention to creating calls-to-action and links to elsewhere in the site.
Success through Measurement and Action
The topic of Analytics has filled many books, so one short blog post is not going to do the topic justice. The purpose of the post is to inspire you to action and get you digging through your Evoq Analytics pages looking for actionable data to improve your site and reach the goals you have set.
Do you have specific data you want to see? What type of insights are you looking for? Let me know via the comments if there is something you need for your site. After all, it’s the people building and using sites every day that know what works the best.