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Create a web traffic report for cncf.io for internal use #607

Closed cjyabraham closed 1 year ago

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

Goals provided by Thabang:

Suggestions for metrics from @thetwopct:

We should use the GA4 property and should define "goals" to track as well.

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

Some options on how to move forward with this:

GA4 Snapshot Report The built-in snapshot report for GA4 seems powerful and perhaps our most direct route to getting the views we need of our data and evolving that over time. For example, here is the view of our data for the last 30 days comparing it to the previous period. The report is customizable with a lot of different widgets so should hopefully meet almost all of our needs.

It appears, however, that this report can only be viewed by users who have been given view access to our analytics, so it would not work for live public consumption although PDF snapshots can be downloaded for inclusion in public-facing publications.

DataStudio Reports If live public consumption is going to be an important use-case down the road, then we may want to go the datastudio route. This will take more time to set up and configure and there are limited template options available for GA4 at the moment since it is so new. Here are a few options, however, for pre-defined GA4-specific templates:

  1. Metricized GA4 Template
  2. Databloo template

Recommendation If the immediate need is to gain insight into our data for internal use, I suggest first seeing if the built-in GA4 snapshot report will meet our needs. Down the road, if there is some subset of live charts we'd like to make public, we could go the datastudio route, similar to how we've done with our blog analytics. Since public consumption is a different use-case to our internal use, we may want to configure those reports differently anyway. Also, as GA4 is relatively new, I assume the options for datastudio templates will mature rapidly in the coming months so we may have some better options for that down the road.

ThabangMash commented 1 year ago

+1 from me, thanks

@cjyabraham will you be working on customizing the widgets? The metrics suggested by @thetwopct + users & new users would be great: Users of the month compared YoY Users of the month compared with previous month New users of the month compared YoY New users of the month compared with previous month Page views of the month compared YOY Page views of the month compared with previous month Page views of the month compared YOY Bounce rate compared with previous month Language of visitors (based on browser settings) Location of visitors (based on Googles interpretation of their IP) Devices used - Desktop + Mobile usage Acquisition of users - general breakdown Acquisition of users - social media focus Acquisition of users - referrals Acquisition of users - keywords (we need to link to Search Console to get this data) Site content - most popular pages Site content - landing pages Site content - landing pages from Search Site content - exit pages Actions - External LInks - Event Label (shows where we're sending clicks) Site speed / Average page performance (I don't recognise the data in the current report)

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

Here is what I have on the report so far:

Finally, just to restate that these overview reports in GA4 do offer us a lot out of the box but also have their constraints. If we do decide we need more flexibility then we can try the data studio option and invest time in building up exactly the report we need there from scratch. That's a much larger investment, however, and will come with its own constraints, so happy to exhaust our options here first.

LMK if you have any thoughts.

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

Also, currently we don't have any custom Events specified on our GA4 property. On the old UA property we had Events defined to track clicks on links, buttons, external links, top navigation links, etc. Are there any specific Events we'd like to set up now to start tracking on the GA4 property?

A few suggestions to start with:

Any others we want?

ThabangMash commented 1 year ago

+1 great to start with external links and newsletter signups. Thanks

On Oct 5, 2022, at 5:40 PM, Chris Abraham @.***> wrote:

 Also, currently we don't have any custom Events specified on our GA4 property. On the old UA property we had Events defined to track clicks on links, buttons, external links, top navigation links, etc. Are there any specific Events we'd like to set up now to start tracking on the GA4 property?

A few suggestions to start with:

external link clicks to see where users are leaving the site to newsletter signups Any others we want?

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cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

I've created two Explorations to surface file downloads (good for tracking PDF downloads of our reports) and outbound clicks (to see where people leave our site to). You can find them in the Explorations section of GA4.

As for newsletter signups, I think we should use the HubSpot analytics for this. It is possible to measure this in GA4, however, it's complex and will likely not be as accurate and useful. The HubSpot analytics are rich and intuitive and are good for tracking performance of all HubSpot objects, such as emails, in addition to the forms. Here are the newsletter form performance analytics and the full list of all of our HubSpot objects are here.

Does this work for you @ThabangMash? I appreciate that, of the list of metrics you requested, you'll need to go to several places to find them all. If it's helpful we could possibly pull them all into a deck once/month to facilitate reading and sharing?

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

Here's an updated list of where to find all the requested metrics:

Metrics found on the Reports Snapshot

Metrics found in Explorations

Others

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

One thing we may want to include here are metrics for our subsites:

We currently have UA properties for each of them but not GA4 properties.

We could also implement cross-domain tracking so that all of these metrics roll up under the same GA4 property so that we can measure users across the entire ecosystem in addition to within each subdomain. LMK if this would be valuable.

caniszczyk commented 1 year ago

+1

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 3:48 PM Chris Abraham @.***> wrote:

One thing we may want to include here are metrics for our subsites:

We could also do cross-domain tracking so that all of these metrics roll up under the same GA4 property so that we can measure users across the entire ecosystem in addition to within each subdomain. LMK if this would be valuable.

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ThabangMash commented 1 year ago

This looks great @cjyabraham thanks

Metrics for subdomains is a great idea, as well cross-domain tracking. OK to put that in a different issue, so we can close this one out.

cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

@ThabangMash how's this for a monthly deck summarizing our analytics?

Currently the metrics over the last month are only compared to those of the preceding period. Once we build up more data on our GA4 property we can compare the numbers to the previous year(s).

If this is ok, would you like a deck like this at the start of every month summarizing the previous month?

Also, I've broken out the subsite tracking to its own issue.

ThabangMash commented 1 year ago

This is great, thanks. Yes please at the start of each month we should report on the previous month.

On Oct 12, 2022, at 8:55 PM, Chris Abraham @.***> wrote:

 @ThabangMash how's this for a monthly deck summarizing our analytics?

Currently the metrics over the last month are only compared to those of the preceding period. Once we build up more data on our GA4 property we can compare the numbers to the previous year(s).

If this is ok, would you like a deck like this at the start of every month summarizing the previous month?

Also, I've broken out the subsite tracking to its own issue.

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cjyabraham commented 1 year ago

Ok, will do. I'll close out this issue now then assuming it's complete.