explore improving tracking of direct traffic on GA

[eread-usgs]

e.g., as recommended here: https://megalytic.com/blog/understanding-direct-traffic-in-google-analytics

[aappling-usgs]

According to our analytics dashboard, our main traffic source has been direct for every viz to date, suggesting that the above link might be able to help us tease it apart further. I'm not sure which sources we're missing - our analytics already catch twitter, reddit, facebook, and r-bloggers, so...instagram and email? Or maybe facebook and twitter are only working on some vizzies, not all? This could be worth a little digging.

[wdwatkins]

If we continue using URL tags, this shouldn't be an issue in the future. That is what that link suggests ☝️. We started with Irma I think.

[aappling-usgs]

Sounds good! And yet, for Irma: looks pretty direct-heavy to me...

Could you share a link to a place where URL tags are used?

[wdwatkins]

URL tags are just attached when you visit a site, they don't go in the code anywhere. i.e. https://owi.usgs.gov/vizlab/hurricane-irma/?utm_source=reddit-sci. So it is really just part of the social media outreach. I suspect a lot of this direct traffic is just us testing, since it is disproportionately from WI and that part is >90% repeat visitors: Since all the traffic for recent vizzies was just the gif on reddit, it stands out more. We could eliminate this by either a) always using a tagged url when we test, e.g. https://owi.usgs.gov/vizlab/hurricane-irma/?utm_source=test, or b) Set up analytics so they only fire on prod

Any time we distribute a link to anyone though, we should be sure to tag it.

[wdwatkins]

Setting a start date to that data to when we actually release the viz would probably drop a good chunk of that I would bet.

[aappling-usgs]

We just had a team slack conversation about the suggestion to "b) Set up analytics so they only fire on prod":

• It's actually sorta useful to have analytics firing on dev, or at least beta, so we can test our analytics beforehand and maybe even develop scripts for rapid feedback when we release the viz
• If we did try to isolate prod, one way would be to set up in the prod jenkins job only something that triggers the inclusion of the analytics info - could be an environment variable with the GA ID, an environment variable flag for VIZ_PROD=TRUE, or perhaps an argument to vizmake() such as analytics_id=xxx or prod=TRUE. Then vizlab would need to be smart enough to add the GA ID to the viz.yaml in time for the publish step, or only use the GA ID when VIZ_PROD=TRUE...something like that.
• Jordan notes that it would be great if we had a more robust way to keep the data pure (across all WMA apps/sites), but we don't...still, keep in mind that maybe there's a solution available somewhere/someday that's even bigger than vizlab
• We suspect data purity for dev vs prod is not a high priority for us, because surely the non-us visitor traffic swamps the traffic from us after release. But still, it's nice to have things in their place.