Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been learning to use Google Analytics, a service by Google that tracks a variety of data and statistics about websites. I’ve been learning to use the service as part of my job as an assistant at UBC’s Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office, which is part of the UBC Library. I’ve been impressed at how much it’s possible to glean about how people are using your website by analyzing the data that Google Analytics collects. Some data it tracks includes:

• How are people finding your site? (through key word searches, typing the URL into the browser, links from other pages, social media, etc.)
• How engaged are they once they reach your site? (average # of pages viewed per session, average amount of time spent on the site, etc.)
• What are your user demographics? (geographically, linguistically, gender, age, and even interests!)
• How many visitors are new vs. returning?
• Much more!

Google Analytics also allows you to filter all of this data based on a variety of criteria (i.e. what’s the average amount of time spent on the “Resources” page by first-time visitors who found the site through a search engine).

Measuring the Impact of Social Media
As mentioned earlier, the service can track the visitors who reach your website through a social media channel. This means that you can see how many people came to your website because of a specific Facebook post or tweet. I think this is a great tool for measuring the effectiveness of social media, particularly for measuring the effectiveness of a particular social media campaign. For example, perhaps you want to increase usage of a particular digital collections site. You could devise a strategy for promoting the collection on social media, and then see how many people you attracted through that channel. You could also analyze the effective postings and try to identify why they were successful in engaging users.

Google Analytics is set up to work most effectively when you also set up goals for your website. The process seems very straightforward for for-profit businesses: sales = success. It seems more difficult to create goals for non-profit organizations such as libraries and museums. I wonder how many libraries and museums have specific goals for their websites and social media campaigns/presences. As social media becomes more prevalent in libraries, archives, and museums, I hope that people start to think more about the strategies behind its use as well as techniques for evaluating what it is actually accomplishing.