GA4

[arnounesco]

GA4 should receive information about

• what has been search
• what facets have been chosen after/with search
• what links / results have been clicked

[Lucy-Scott]

The analytics solution must enable us to track data from now into the future. Arno - also option to store the data on our server ourselves. can ALSO use GA or another tool.

We need to track

• unique users
• landing pages, traffic etc.
• number of searches
• search terms
• country of source of search
• result clicked on
• user country for result clicked

[jmckenna]

Related: Matomo is a very popular analytics tracker, that is free if we host ourselves on IODE server. I think there is no harm in having both GA4 and Matomo running, and, with Matomo we will always have the past data locally (there is no 14-month rule etc).

[arnounesco]

We have to move away from GA if we want stats from all over the world. As far as I know GA will not work for Chinese and Iranian visits and might be a problem for Russian visits in the future. Matomo looks promising to me and is scalable if we would need more in the future.

[emarzini]

We can investigate on it. Anyway some considerations from our side:

• we highly discourage using 2 in-parallel setups: you're going to have massive headaches with mismatching metrics for litte to no added value

• on-premise Matomo has some limitations on the custom reports available, that need to be purchased as add-on starting from €199/year https://matomo.org/pricing/ We are going to explore more in depth the granularity of the standard site search report included in the free tier and confirm if it satisfies OIH's needs

• the estimated cost (given the historical traffic volumes to the OIH website) for BigQuery should be in the ballpark of less than €1 per month. There is also a $300 free credit for new Google Cloud Platform accounts that can be used https://cloud.google.com/bigquery https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing

• we want to inspect to what extent it's possible to leverage custom dimension to have the requested report granularity in the GA4 standard report interface, so not subjected to the 14-month data retention limit -> to do so we would like to mirror the current tracking in a test GA4 property and run some testing there

[emarzini]

Hi all, here a first approach to define the events fired by React to send to Matomo information related to user actions

Category*	Action*	Name	Description	Notes
search	simple_search	$searchTerm|$region	"fired when a search page result is displayed, coming from a SIMPLE search; block on refresh (how???); block on pagination (how???)"	convert the "," character -if present- to "[COMMA]"
search	advanced_search	$searchTerm|$region|$params	"fired when a search page result is displayed, coming from an ADVANCED search; block on refresh (how???); block on pagination (how???)"	convert the "," character -if present- to "[COMMA]"
search	sorted_search	$searchTerm|$region|$typeOfSearch|$oldSortingCriterion|$newSortingCriterion|$params	fired when a "sorting" dropdown is used to change to a different sorting criterion	"convert the "","" character -if present- to ""[COMMA]""; $typeOfSearch = simple OR advanced OR refined"
search	refined_search	$searchTerm|$region|$typeOfSearch|$oldParams|$newParams	"fired when a search page result is displayed, coming from a previous search, AFTER changing the applied facets or applying new ones; block on refresh (how???)"	"convert the "","" character -if present- to ""[COMMA]""; $typeOfSearch = simple OR advanced OR refined"
search	change_result_page	$searchTerm|$region|$typeOfSearch|$oldPageNumber|$newPageNumber	"fired when a search page result is displayed, coming from a pagination click event block the standard simple_search or advanced_search event (how???); block on refresh (how???)"	"convert the "","" character -if present- to ""[COMMA]""; $typeOfSearch = simple OR advanced OR refined"
click	click_on_result	$destination_URL|$result_position|$current_page_number|$total_pages|$querystring_with_search_and_facets	fired when the title of a result item in the search result page is clicked	convert the "," character -if present- to "[COMMA]"
click	click_on_jsonld	$destination_URL|$result_position|$current_page_number|$total_pages|$querystring_with_search_and_facets	fired when the jsonld button of a result item in the search result page is clicked	convert the "," character -if present- to "[COMMA]"
misc	page_refresh	$currentUrl	fired on page refresh (how???)	convert the "," character -if present- to "[COMMA]"

[emarzini]

@arnounesco we are ready to start the development of the above approach. Please give your feedback if you think adjustments are needed.

[it-iode]

@Lucy-Scott can we see what we want to see on the stats server (https://analytics.iode.org)