Strategy

Do a search for "personas" on the web and you’ll get a smorgasbord of smiling faces of all ages and from all backgrounds - and top results are all related to design, user experience, and agile. Demographic-based and often marketing-driven, personas are pretty mainstream and relatable - except when they’re not.

And like the web, personas are evolving.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that gives you the ability to slice and dice your website traffic in many ways, with plenty of metrics and dimensions to choose from. If you are just starting with Google Analytics, it's likely that you are a bit overwhelmed by all the metrics that are available to you. We will cover the basics for you, as well as explain what to use and when to use them. 

When organizations talk about what they believe in, it’s weird. A company, nonprofit, university, etc. isn’t a person, it has no singular moral “self” who would value anything. So how can a group’s values communicate anything authentic? How do you faithfully articulate the shared values of a set of co-workers?

So, you’ve set up your Google Analytics account and have a working implementation, but something doesn't feel quite right. Your spidey sense is tingling, the data you are getting is not complete. You need to figure out what, if anything, is broken. This post is all about that: debugging and troubleshooting.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it can be unwieldy and inscrutable to the uninitiated. Sharing PDF exports is cumbersome and static. Analytics data may be spread across multiple accounts, making it hard to see the bigger picture. To address these problems and more, I spoke at Drupal North this year on how dashboards can turn analytics data into informational, easy-to-understand reports through data visualization. Check out the video of my presentation here.

What can’t be measured can’t be managed. Now, you don't need to be a data scientist to make decisions based on your users’ activity, but it’s crucial that your configuration is top-notch. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. Google Analytics provides an easy-to-use platform that’s able to go very granular with the data we need to collect. In this series, I will discuss how to configure Google Analytics, how to make sure the data you receive is actionable, and some common misconceptions about the platform.

Are you a marketing or IT manager who’s confused when navigating Google Analytics? Wish you could see only key performance indicators in one place? Or, do you want to share only some of your data in an automatically updated report? Kalamuna has created a Google Data Studio (GDS) report template to help our clients better visualize their data, and because part of our mission is to help colleges and universities meet their goals through technology, we’re creating free reports for higher-ed professionals now until April 30.