Setup Google Analytics on website

[ashlingam]

Overview

Setup Google Analytics on website. This includes implementation of code snippets, deciding on metrics to track, and set up of the dashboard.

Repeated visits to the various sections of the website will skew dashboard data and impede the team's ability to get an accurate picture of user behavior. GA provides a mechanism to exclude individual IP addresses from data collection. See instructions below.

Action Items

• Choose an analytics tool (e.g. Google Analytics, Matomo)
• Implement analytics tool with website
• Collect team members' IP address and exclude from dashboard analytics
• Set up the GA dashboard to collect data of interest
• Move Website User Behavior Modeling - current visitor data gathering #128 to the prioritized backlog

Resources/Instructions

Google Analytics

Exclude IP address instructions: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en

GA account setup: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en
Tag setup: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008080

Matomo
https://matomo.org
matomo-org/matomo#13016

[ashlingam]

@wesrowe It turns out that Hotjar's free tier caps users at 3 funnels and doesn't allow page-specific recordings (only the default home page). Can Google Analytics service our needs entirely? If not, I looked into Mixpanel and their free tier appears to be more generous, including funnels and recordings by segment. Also, do we already have a Google Analytics account set up, or do we need to create one?

[wesrowe]

@harishlingam I don't believe there is a GA account already for the HfLA website. Might as well created a new one.
As for hotjar -- honestly, for the use cases I'm aware of GA would be adequate for understanding user behavior on our site. Recordings are typically useful at the margins, and we're not there yet. GA would be good to focus on as a next step.

[ashlingam]

@wesrowe That makes sense Wes. A new member of our team suggested looking at Matomo, an open-source GA alternative: https://matomo.org/get-matomo/, but the advantages it offers don't appear to be relevant to us. I will bring up getting GA set up in our next meeting.

[ashlingam]

Google Analytics code snippet:

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-167506267-1"></script> <script> window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-167506267-1'); </script>

[ashlingam]

A Google Analytics account has been created for HFLA under the webadmin@hackforla.org account. The GA snippet is to be pasted as the first item into the HEAD tag of every page we want to track.

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

Remove full story and replace with GA code #503 (comment)