Tags » Web Application Development

I had not realized that the Custom Advanced Segments that I created as an administrator would not be available to other users. Here are links to each custom segment that you can import into your account. In order for this to work, you have to (at least temporarily) switch back to the Old Version of the Google Analytics interface, since segment sharing hasn’t been added to the new version yet. You can switch back to the New Version as soon as you’re done importing the segments you want.

The reason we’re using Advanced Segments here instead of separate profiles with filters is that we’ve reached the internal limit of 50 profiles and would have to delete some of the historical data in order to create new ones. Chris is in touch with our Google reps about increasing our quota and, if he’s successful, we’ll create profiles for each of these services. You’ll still be able to use these Advanced Segments on the main profiles and, personally, I find them a lot easier to work with.

You can also create your own Advanced Segments to filter the Analytics data. Here’s how I created each of these to filter on Hostname (these steps use the New Version):

1. Click on Advanced Segments in the Standard Reporting screen.
2. Click on + New Custom Segment.
3. Give it a name like site.middlebury.edu
4. Choose Hostname from the green drop-down box.
5. Choose Matching RegExp from the next drop-down box.
6. In the text field enter ^site\.middlebury\.edu
7. Click Save segment.

To kick off the new year, we’re beginning to combine tracking of web analytics under a single Google Analytics tracking code. This will allow us to better understand how visitors to our many web sites and applications browse between them. When someone visits our homepage, clicks on a link to a story in the Middlebury Magazine blog, which then links them to an event with tickets for sale at the Box Office, we’ll be able to visualize the entire visit to the site. We’ll also be able to easily do side-by-side comparisons of traffic across our sites.

The screenshots below show the new version of the Google Analytics interface, which you may choose to enable in the upper-right corner of their page.

When you log in to Google analytics you’ll now want to select “middlebury.edu (all)” (or internal / external) under “UA-993303-1 – http://www.middlebury.edu”. This “middlebury.edu” profile includes traffic from the sites we’ve moved over.

On the Standard Reporting page, you can select Advanced Segments at the top and then narrow the reporting data to include only the sites you want to view.

We have not yet moved over all of our services into this tracking code and some we’ve only moved today, so you’ll only see data for them from January 5 onward. Here’s the list of services we’ve moved at the time of this post:

• cat.middlebury.edu
• biblio.middlebury.edu
• sites.middlebury.edu
• boxoffice.middlebury.edu
• courses.middlebury.edu
• facstaff.middlebury.edu
• go.middlebury.edu
• m.middlebury.edu
• menus.middlebury.edu
• museum.middlebury.edu
• portal.middlebury.edu
• sandcat.middlebury.edu
• students.middlebury.edu
• web.middlebury.edu
• www.middlebury.edu

We have not removed any of the historical data for these services, so you can still check the other profiles you had access to previously to examine that information. This change does not affect any domains other than middlebury.edu, so there will be no changes to miis.edu, davisprojectsforpeace.org, alumniconnections.com, etc. at this time.

If you’d like to learn more about using Google Analytics, there is a great course available on our online learning system at http://go.middlebury.edu/lynda.