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Abstract
Installing Google Analytics is the first step, but most libraries have more than a single website-think library website, catalog, blog, and other online tools-that they maintain. Chapter 2 of Library Technology Reports (vol 49, no. 4) "Maximizing Google Analytics: Six High-Impact Practices" provides an overview of the basic implementation process and recommends that libraries should track all their websites using Google Analytics. Learn how to install the tool on various library-specific platforms in order to track your library's entire web presence.
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How Does It Work?
The first generation of web analytics tools, available at the dawn of the Internet, were not hosted third-party products like Google Analytics, but software that was usually installed locally on the web server. There were (and still are) many open source or freely available tools, called log file analyzers. These tools can out- put a great deal of information about website activ- ity, but it is not necessarily user-centric, actionable information, and it tends to reflect more intelligence about how the web server is performing than about what visitors are doing on a site. Information about visits and visitors-how the website and its content are being used by real people, rather than how many files the server is spitting out in a given time period- can be teased out, but not always quickly or easily. Finally, installing, configuring, and updating this type of software locally is not an insignificant undertaking, especially in libraries where IT resources are all too often stretched thin.
Enter the second generation of web analytics tools, which includes Google Analytics. Rather than analyz- ing log files, Google Analytics uses a dozen-line-long snippet of JavaScript (also known as the tracking code), placed invisibly into web pages, to send infor- mation about visits and visitors on your website to Google's data center. The data center processes the information sent by the JavaScript snippet and returns numbers that can be massaged into interesting, action- able information-not just "hits"-in a user-friendly dashboard on the Google Analytics site. You don't even need access to the website after the initial instal- lation to have access to the data! Once you place the tracking code in your web pages, no regular technical maintenance (other than keeping...