Analyzing Website Traffic

For Fun and Insight

Leon KingComputer Engineering TechnologyNetwork Support Technician

Tell Me A Story

Search

Documents Retrieved

Documents Desired

Precision of Result

•Search is imprecise – we often find things what we don’t know we want

•The famous “Page Rank” algorithm (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1995, Stanford University) taps the collective consciousness of the community

Google: “mediation/arbitration”

Majority of articles showed that unions did better.

Was this actually true... or a reflection of the fact that there were more faculty members than management doing a search?

Google’s Page Rank Told Me The Probable Outcome of the 2006 Faculty Strike

Where Does The Information Come From?

Client/Router/ISP/Server/ Header Information User Forms Log Files Cookies History Search Requests

It’s All About Internet Architecture

Access Log Name of Page When Accessed IP Address (who, where) Browser and OS Version Device Type Referring Web Page QueryString (Optionally) Cookies

◦ Login ID◦ Bread Crumbs (a trail of previous pages viewed – but only for

our site)

Error Log Missing Web Pages Search Requests With No Results

Our Web Server Logs All Requests

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.

John Wanamaker (1838-1922)

Traditional Marketting:

Market Segmentation

Funnels and Goals

Stickiness & Bounce

What Analysts Look For Age

Behaviour

Ethnicity

Income

Interests

Location

Sex

You send this information back to Google They consolidate it and generate reports

(free) The also generate reports on your industry

or market (paid) Analytics is used to market “AdWords”

(income stream)

What Google Analytics Does

Pick a company or a topic1. Why are people interested (or not)?2. What are the trends – can you link these to

events?3. Where is the interest coming from? 4. Be creative – tell me a story

How To Use This in the Classroom

Alexa.com

Google.com/trends

Google.com/websites

google.com/analytics

Competitive Intelligence

1. Create an Analytics Account w. Google 2. Google gives you a “key” embedded in a

file analytics.js of javascript code – include a link to this code in each web page

3. Everytime your web page is loaded a packet of information is sent to google

4. To track the download of links (assignments, pdf files) one needs to add a function call to the onclick method

Adding Analytics to Your Web Page

<a href="CENG411-Lab1.docx" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(Lab1');"

> Lab 1 </a>

analytics.js

Tracking a download

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-55555555-5']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

HeatMap of the News: newsmap.jp Twittering The Mood of the Internet:

wefeelfine.org

Other Forms of Collective Intelligence