Using segments in Google Analytics to identify external users

As Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik frequently points out, "All data in aggregate is cr*p", and if you want to get anything useful out of it you need to segment it.

For us, a fairly simple-sounding bit of segmentation is to look at how external users use our site compared to our internal audience of staff and students.

Although we can segment quite easily based on whether a user was on campus or not, that doesn’t give us a completely clear picture, as staff and students both frequently access our site from off-campus. Students use it from private rented accommodation and when they’re away from York during vacations, and staff use the site from home and when travelling on university business too.

Our new approach is to try to infer whether someone is an internal user or not based on factors such as the content they look at and the things that they search for.

Our 'Probably an external user' segment

Some of the conditions used to identify external users

So to try to identify external users, we've got an advanced segment is set to exclude sessions that meet any of the following criteria:

We're the service provider

An easy one to start with - exclude any sessions where the service provider is University of York.

Looked at pages that only internal users can see

Another easy one: exclude any pages that are behind authentication, which users wouldn’t be able to access without logging in. For example, the Timetabling Gateway or Student Enquiry System.

Looked at pages that that are aimed at internal users

This one is less clear cut as we have a lot of internally focussed pages that are publicly accessible, so external users can end up viewing them, accidentally or otherwise. We also know that there are some cases where our information architecture isn’t quite right and we end up directing prospective students to information that’s in the current students branch.

But still, if someone looks at anything in www.york.ac.uk/staff and www.york.ac.uk/students then it’s a pretty good signal that they’re an internal users, so we exclude them. We’re also excluding any URLs that include the words intranet, internal or current-students (with some regular expressions to catch variants with and without hyphenation or an ‘s’ on the end).

Searched for things that internal users use 

Again, it’s not 100% clear cut, but if someone searches for one of our internal systems then it’s likely that they’re a student or member of staff.

So we exclude any sessions where the user searched for things such as VLE, Moodle, eVision, VPN, email or Planon.

Using the segment

Here's how our audience overview looks with this segment applied (the orange line) compared to all of our traffic (the blue line):

It's not perfect (but that's not the point), but you can see right away that usage patterns are different, with much less of a drop-off at the weekend for external users.

Further reading

• A Common Mistake You Make When Building Segments in Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics and other tools to visualise how our global navigation gets used

One of the big challenges of a responsive design, especially for a large site like ours, is how to tackle navigation.

When you're designing for large screens there's a lot of horizontal space available, so you can include quite a lot of links without feeling that you're overcrowding the page.

Our header navigation is fairly typical of other university websites, with links to all the major areas of our site and links for our main audiences.

Our header contains 15 links and a search box

Counting the links, there are 15 in total, plus a search box. Here's the full list:

1. Homepage (via logo)
2. Study
3. Research
4. Business
5. Departments
6. International
7. About 
8. News
9. Events
10. Contact
11. Jobs
12. Visitors
13. Alumni
14. Current students
15. Staff

So, how do we fit all of these links in to a design that's going to work on small screens? Actually, let's take a step back and look at a different question: do we need all of these links in the first place?

Looking at the numbers

Taking inspiration from the GDS post on 7 ways we’ve used Google Analytics ‘outside the box’, I wanted to get an idea of how our users are moving between the main parts of our website, and whether they were using the global navigation links that we provide in our headers.

Google Analytics isn't great at answering this type of question directly, so first of all I exported a load of data using Supermetrics Data Grabber for Excel, looking at what the sources of traffic were to all of the pages that are available in our global navigation. 

Configuring a report in Supermetrics Data Grabber

I grabbed the data for the whole of last year so that any seasonal variations were taken into account. Supermetrics Data Grabber can handily download unsampled data, which is another problem that Google Analytics has when you try to look at big picture problems over a long time period.

Some of the raw data - not pretty (yet)

I then started to clean up the data, replacing the path names with plain English labels and adding values to show what level in the hierarchy we were looking at.

This is already quite useful, and allows me to quickly answer questions that would be time consuming in Analytics.

For example, if I wanted to see how many pageviews the staff homepage gets that come from either the Study or Research branches, I just need to tick a few boxes and Excel's filters take care of the rest. (If you're interested, the answer is 4,450).

Excel's filters are a quick way of segmenting traffic

Pivoting

We can then go a step further and put this data into a pivot table.

The table below shows branches of our site along the top, and the pages that are available from our global navigation down the side, so we can see how much traffic is going from one area of the site to another.

Expressing these numbers as percentages and applying some conditional formatting lets us see some patterns. Right away we can see how the homepage is acting as a major jumping-off point to the other areas of the site (which shouldn't come as a surprise).

Patterns begin to emerge

We can also see which parts of the site have strong linkages between them, and where the links are weaker.

What next?

We're still making sense of this data, and are looking at other sources such as CrazyEgg and search logs, but we're getting the strong feeling that we don't need to provide as many global navigation options as we do currently, and certainly not as prominently. The homepage is the exception to this as it's a starting point for a diverse range of users, but most of the time it's more important to present users with links related to the content that they're looking it rather than links to completely different areas of the site.

Top 10 press releases, features and public lectures on the web in 2012

While it may be April, there are always things we can learn from evaluating past years, so we’ve decided to have a look over the most popular news, features and public lectures were on the University website in 2012.

Press releases

The University’s Press Office published over 200 press releases in 2012, resulting in media coverage around the world. The top stories on the University website were as follows.

10. Yoga: a cost-effective treatment for back pain sufferers?

Published mid-August, this story of the UK’s largest study of the health benefits of yoga describes how specialised classes could be a cost-effective way of treating back pain. The story had a second spike in visits in mid-Autumn as interest picked up again on Facebook.

9. University of York formally joins the Russell Group today

This article from August announces the University’s joining of the Russell Group, following its acceptance to the organisation earlier in the year.

8. University of York students celebrate success

Graduation was in the second week of July. A lot of traffic here came from Google, Twitter and Facebook.

7. Academic leaders help York to mark its 50th year

For its fiftieth anniversary, the University appointed sixteen new professors, as detailed in this article from July 4th.

6. Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life

Published in January, this story describes a process which hints at how life on Earth first formed. Almost a quarter of the article’s traffic came through the University’s RSS feed.

5. Pioneering archaeology wins Royal award for University of York

On February 24th the Queen presented the University with an award for its archaeological research.

4. Gender equality influences how people choose their lovers

This article from September covers a study from the Department of Psychology on how increased gender equality has reduced gender differences in mate selection.

3. “Trust” provides answer to handaxe enigma

Almost three quarters of the hits on this piece from November 21st are attributable to links from archaeological news aggregator archaeologica.org. It covers research by the Department of Archaeology which suggested that paleolithic handaxes showed bonds of trust between specimens of homo erectus, challenging earlier theories of dominance and aggression.

2. Scientists “record” magnetic breakthrough

Our most-visited science article for the year was this one, detailing how physicists at the University were able to use magnets in a way which could potentially have big impacts on hard drive transfer speeds. The discovery was cited on tech news website engadget.com, where it inspired a spirited exchange in the comments thread.

1. The University of York is to become a member of the influential Russell Group of leading UK universities

The University’s invitation to join the Russell Group in March 2012 was by far the most viewed news story of the year, receiving almost three times as much traffic as the second place story (see the huge spike in the chart above). Over 10% of viewers came from Facebook.

Features

In addition to press release stories, we also publish feature articles which either delve deeper into academic work taking place at the University and tell other interesting stories. These were the most visited last year:

10. Ant behaviour tracked by tiny radio receivers in pioneering scientific study‌

After fitting one thousand ants with radio receivers, scientists at York tracked them to discover how they network and live.

9. York wins Outstanding Engineering Research Team award

While the article concerns the Times Higher Education Awards 2011 and was published in November that year, this article continued to receive significant numbers of visitors throughout the first half of 2012

8. You@York

Applicants who received an offer to study at York gain access to You@York, a personalised site providing information from the University and departments. The traffic patterns are interesting here, declining slowly over the year and spiking on A-level results day in August.

7. University of York wins Times Higher Education Award for Support for Early Career Researchers

The University won the award mentioned above, while several departments were shortlisted for other awards. The feature detailed the steps the University has taken in order to qualify, as well as information on the awards ceremony itself.

6. York celebrates ‘ideas’ with events for everyone

The annual York Festival of Ideas provided many experiences and exhibitions under the theme of “Metamorphosis”.

5. HRH The Princess Royal opens Diamond Wood at the University of York‌

HRH Princess Anne visited York to open the Diamond Wood at Heslington East in September 2012

4. “It’s behind you!” A look into the history of pantomime

An interesting entry on the history of pantomime, this was originally published in January 2011 and saw consistent hits throughout the year followed by a significant boost in the run-up to Christmas. Almost all hits were directly from Google, where the page ranks highly in searches for “pantomime history”.

3. Welcome to the University of York!

This feature provided links to resources that new students at the University would find useful. Most of its attention was focussed very clearly on the week running up to Welcome Week.

2. Public in the swim at York Sport Village

The £9m York Sport Village opened in August, featuring a swimming pool for both students and the public. The opening of such a large development generated a lot of interest, with the bulk of traffic coming directly from Google searches.

1. The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50

When the University was named one of the top ten “young” Universities in the world in May 2012, this feature summarised our achievement and the areas in which University excels. The page received almost eight times as many hits as our number two feature, including a large spike on first publication but then a steady stream of additional visits throughout the year (the page was linked prominently from most web pages using our standard design).

Public lectures

The University puts on a large number of free public lectures each year, attracting many people from both within the University and from the local community. The lectures cover all sorts of topics and are well worth attending - look out for the summer programme for this year coming soon.

In 2012, the most visited public lecture web pages were:

10. Sounds which can't be heard: The hidden secrets of an MP3 player

Professor David Howard from the Department of Electronics gave this lecture on the compression techniques used to shrink MP3 files.

9. Did Twitter save Bletchley Park?

As part of the Athena Swan programme, Dr Sue Black from University College London delivered this lecture on the efforts to save the World War Two codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park from decay.

8. Music and Physics

Professor Peter Main from the Department of Physics gave this lecture on the intermeshing of science and art, receiving a lot of attention in February.

7. Divided Britain: The causes and consequences of income inequality in the UK

On the theme of economic trouble, former Director-General of the Council for British Industry, Sir Richard Lambert delivered this lecture on the causes and consequences of the wealth gap in the UK. Interestingly for a lecture, this received fairly consistent traffic throughout October and November, instead of a large rise then fall.

6. Remembering the past: Protecting the future

York’s own Dr Jane Grenville delivered this lecture as a part of the events surrounding Holocaust Memorial Day

5. The Public Secret

Royal Holloway College’s Professor Robert Eaglestone delivered this lecture about public awareness of genocide as a part of Holocaust Memorial day.

4. Austerity or stimulus? How Keynes and Hayek shape our economic debate

This economics lecture was delivered by journalist Nicholas Wapshott and discussed how modern economic theories impact the global economy. Traffic to the page gradually rose before the event itself, before falling once it was over.

3. What do animals think?

This Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture was delivered by Cambridge’s Professor Tim Crane and focussed on questions of consciousness and existence.

2. Unemployment in recession

This topical lecture from Professor Christopher Pissarides of LSE covered modern thoughts on unemployment and its causes. Traffic followed a U-shape, peaking both when tickets became available and on the day of the talk itself.

1. Paradox: The nine greatest enigmas in science

Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey delivered this lecture on mysteries and questions that people have about science. As expected for a popular figure in science education, demand for tickets drove traffic particularly high in the weeks preceding the talk.

Are homepage carousels effective? (AKA the Brad Frost Carousel Challenge)

After reading Brad Frost's blog post about the effectiveness of carousels a couple of months ago, I decided to take up his challenge and see just how well the carousel on the University homepage was performing.

We put a lot of effort into producing a steady steam of features to go into the carousel, but does anyone actually read them?

The University of York homepage, complete with carousel in the top right

Our carousel is of the auto-advancing variety, with controls for pagination and pause / resume provided below. We didn't previously set a limit on the number of items that could be displayed in the carousel, but there were often eight or nine items to cycle through at any one time.

The results are in

We started tracking clicks on the carousel slides towards the end of February, along with clicks on the pagination and play/pause controls below. Technical details of the tracking setup can be found towards the end of this post.

For the first two weeks of tracking (20 February to 5 March), the distribution of clicks on the carousel slides looked like this:

Click distribution on carousel slides, 20 Feb to 5 March

It didn't come as too much of a surprise that the slide in first position got the most attention, but I wasn't expecting to see such a large skew. Around half of the clicks were on the first slide, with numbers dropping off rapidly after that. The poor slides in position eight were barely ever seeing the light of day.

The pause / resume button is rarely used, with less than 300 events registered (257 pauses, 36 resumes) since we've been tracking it. This suggests that the button is probably not noticeable enough.

Fewer carousel slots = more clicks?

Given that the items in positions outside the first few slots weren't getting much attention, we decided to reduce the number of items we have in the carousel to a maximum of five.

Total numbers of carousel clicks, 20 Feb - 27 March

We reduced the number of slots to 5 on around 15 March. Since then we've seen consistently more clicks on the carousel than we did when there were more features to choose from.

A possible explanation is that some of stories that we've had in the carousel over the last couple of weeks have been a bit more high-profile than usual (the announcement of our new Vice-Chancellor, BBC Question Time being broadcast on campus and our China graduation ceremony), which may have generated more interest anyway.

A more interesting theory is that we're seeing the paradox of choice in action - that giving people more choices creates anxiety and results in them not choosing anything. By reducing the number of items available to choose from, it's easier to make a choice and click on something.

We'll come back to this in a few weeks and see if we're still generating more clicks with fewer features.

The technical bit

If you're interested in how we're tracking this, read on.

Clicks on each of the carousel slides are tracked as events in Google Analytics. Analytics requires three values when tracking an event (category, action and label), which we're tracking as follows:

• Event Category: Carousel
• Event Action: slide-N clicked 
• Event Label: Destination URL

So an example event might look like:
'Carousel', 'slide-1-clicked', 'http://www.york.ac.uk/50/events/china/'

The call for each event is automatically assembled with jQuery, so there's no manual tagging required each time a new item is added to the carousel.

Categorising events in this way seems to work well as it allows us to view the data in quite a lot of different ways within Analytics.

Look out for

Something that tripped me up at first was that not all of the clicks on the carousel were registering with Analytics, and were appearing as 'cancelled' requests within Chrome's inspector panel.

Look out for cancelled requests (shown in red) in Chrome's inspector panel

The simple solution to this is to delay the request by a fraction of a second so that the event has time to register before the destination page starts to load. See Google's documentation on tracking outbound links for how to do this.

Streaming graduation

Around 1,600 students graduated over the course of three ceremonies last Friday and two on Saturday, alongside four honorary graduates and several thousand family and friends. For the first time, we also streamed the ceremonies online so that remote audiences could share in the event.

As this was a low-key pilot of running a live stream of the ceremonies, we only announced that they would be viewable online the day before the first ceremony. At that point we put a prominent link on the University homepage, on the graduation web pages and shared the news on our Twitter and Facebook presences.

Viewing stats

We were pretty pleased with how the streaming went. A large number of people accessed the stream, including many who watched for extended periods. A very simple summary in numbers:

• ~2,500 unique pageviews of the video page
• Visits from 68 countries
• 20% of visits from mobile devices (inc. tablets)
• 450Gb data streamed from server

I put together a few slides containing a more detailed breakdown which you can see below.

Behind the scenes

For the techies reading, I'll attempt to describe how the footage made its way to the web, but my involvement (and expertise!) was pretty well limited to putting the embed code in a page to display the player. The fine folk in our AV team dealt with the on-site setup and encoding, and we used a third-party to handle the streaming broadcast.

The video footage itself was being produced and directed live by a third party supplier, Visions Unlimited, who were on site to film the ceremonies for DVD (you can buy a DVD of any ceremony since 2010).

We ran the video footage through a PC running Flash Media Encoder, and uploaded it to a third-party streaming video provider. They took care of trans-coding the footage into two formats - one for Flash-supporting devices and one for everything else (principally iOS devices) - and load-balancing the traffic so that we could scale up the provision if a lot of people tuned in. The footage was embedded into the page using JWPlayer, with a separate link for non-Flash devices.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

A new online community for alumni and friends

On Friday last week we were proud to at last launch YorkSpace.net, the University's new online home for alumni and friends.

It's been a long road to launch, but we're pleased with the end product. Features include:

- A searchable alumni directory to find old class- and college-mates

- Online updating of your alumni record and newsletter subscriptions

- Details and signup for regional, global and profession-specific alumni networks

- Event registration for public lectures and alumni events

- Online donations

- Lots more - sign up and take a look!

Building the site

The team in Development and Alumni Relations deserve all the credit for the content and putting in the graft to make the site happen. It's been a huge effort getting it all ready and they've done a great job under considerable pressure.

I've been involved in a technical/design/user experience capacity so I've been figuring out some of the 'how does it work' (or, in more cases than we would have liked, if it works at all) type of jobs, but also bothering the Alumni team with my obsession with content inventory spreadsheets and pernickety details like changing 'click here' and 'contact us' email links.

Adventures in Analytics

One of the really interesting aspects of deploying YorkSpace.net for me is implementing Google Analytics for it.

We have a massive GA profile for the main University site, but we don't manage many goals or any ecommerce transactions on that site. YorkSpace.net is giving me chance to learn a few new things about Google Analytics and hopefully to find new ways to improve the site as it develops. A future post on the details may follow if I can ever get the darned ecommerce transactions to track properly...

Going mobile, one small step at a time

Earlier in the year I wrote a post on Mobile browser trends into 2010, where I looked at how traffic from mobile devices had be steadily rising from around a thousand visits per month in April 2009, to seven thousand visits per month in April 2010.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to these figures lately, but I was quite shocked to see that mobile traffic had rocketed up to twenty thousand visits per month. Perhaps a bigger shock was that this increase had been much less gradual than over the previous year. Growth had remained steady until September this year, but then the start of the new academic year saw a doubling of visits - hello to our new intake of smartphone-carrying students.

Smartphone traffic to york.ac.uk, 24 December 2009 to 24 December 2010. The huge leap is the start of the new academic year

So will 2011 be the year that we start to make some headway into the mobile world? Hopefully we can make some time alongside the other projects that we've committed to for next year.

Making our blog mobile-friendly

How the blog now appears on an iPhone

My actual reason for writing this post, before I got distracted by looking at graphs, was to say that this blog now has a mobile enabled template, so should be much easier to read on a smaller screen.

(Aside - if you're a blogger user, this is really simple to enable for your own blog. See New mobile templates for reading on the go - Blogger in draft.)

While we may not have a mobile version of the university website for the twenty thousand people who look at it each month on their mobile, the small band of followers of this blog can now enjoy a better mobile reading experience.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Mobile browser trends into 2010

Who doesn't love a good graph?

Following on from Dan's post about Browser Trends into 2010, I though it would be interesting to look at all smartphone traffic to the site over the last year.

A year ago we had just over a thousand visits per month from iPhones, Androids, Blackberrys, etc. We're now up to almost seven thousand. Still small numbers in the grand scheme of things, but a huge increase percentage wise.

For anyone who's interested, this graph was created using an advanced segment in Google Analytics, configured to include traffic with a browser or operating system that matched the regular expression:

android|black|HTC|iphone|ipod|lg|nokia|
palm|samsung|sonysymbian|vodafone|treo|xda|netfront

Browser trends into 2010

I noticed a post by Nick at UCL a couple of weeks ago about browser trends in 2009 on their site and it prompted me to have a look at our numbers too.

As Nick noted in his post, these trends are not really a surprise but they're still interesting and it's worth keeping an eye on the big picture.

Here are our trends over the past year:

IE6





IE7





IE8


Chrome


Safari


Mac


iPhone


(Caveat: we've been rolling Google Analytics out more widely over the past year so a small amount of upward trending is likely down to us covering more pages over time)


Update:
Someone pointed out that I forgot to include Firefox, so here's just one more:


Update 2!:
Arthur noted that comparisons would be more useful, so I pulled some of the data into Excel and came up with this (click through to see a bigger, almost-legible version):

Happy Birthday - Firefox turns five!

In case you missed it, Mozilla Firefox turned five years old yesterday, which is nearly a lifetime in Internet years.




I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how browser usage has changed on our site over the last couple of years. We started using Google Analytics back in May 2007, and Firefox usage has been steadily on the increase since then, rising from 11% to 21% of our traffic:



Over that same time period we've seen Internet Explorer usage drop from 86% to 66%, and Safari and Chrome on the rise, with 8% and 3% shares respectively.

Browser	Percentage of traffic, October 2009	Percentage of traffic, May 2007
1. Internet Explorer	66.32%	86.24%
2. Firefox	21.29%	11.18%
3. Safari	7.75%	1.77%
4. Chrome	3.30%	0.00%
5. Opera	0.64%	0.24%

And amazingly, Netscape is still lurking in the top ten, with 832 visitors (0.10%) last month, who must still think it's 2002.