CUNY Academic Commons

Thank you for the time you've spent on this, Boone. If needed, we can seek out a meeting with a rep from the GA team, but let's see how things go.

I've put a test in place for main-nav clicks and will monitor over the upcoming days https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/7eb4a5930c4f072b0d51ba2ea58ec1d987db5e5a. See https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/migration/measurement/events, https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10075209?visit_id=637786348250600608-2555019247&rd=1

Slightly-related, the cac-bp-nelo JS file was not being enqueued on the homepage, so Google Analytics events for users clicking on the main nav from the homepage were missed.

I caused this during some optimizing work to reduce homepage asset-loading in #14909. I've just added back the cac-bp-nelo JS file so it is enqueued on all pages now in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/96cb20fbc52da6e2aa01addb03d2a4c0a90b8607. This is also deployed on production.

In https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/efdb5a39e700fdc4207d4251b66789938b895081 I've added a bunch of click events to the GA4 config. It now covers the following:

- Main navigation clicks
- Various uses of all filters (searches and checkboxes) across the four main directories (Groups, Sites, People, Courses)
- Directory tabs, like 'My Groups', 'All Groups'

There are many ways to slice up this data and I'm not confident that I've chosen the proper one, but perhaps we'll have better insight in a couple days, once data starts rolling in and we can pull some reports.

Many thanks, Boone. I'm seeing data on all three of these coming through. The main nav one is pretty clear.

The directory filter one seems to be broken up by individual filter, which is good, and you can see which options are being chosen within that filter (like individual campus names). I'm trying to figure out how to track which filters are being used the most overall, though, as the Event Count and Total Users seem to be the same across all of them. Maybe the key is the "(not set)" item for each, suggesting that the filters that "aren't set" the most often are the least used? Maybe clear enough, but making sure.

I'm not sure what the directory tab one is tracking, though. Sorry if I'm missing something obvious there. I'm seeing parameters like blogs-personal, groups-personal, blogs-following, members-all... thanks for clariftying.

I'm not sure what the directory tab one is tracking, though. Sorry if I'm missing something obvious there. I'm seeing parameters like blogs-personal, groups-personal, blogs-following, members-all... thanks for clariftying.

These are the tabs at the top of the directories. 'blogs-personal' is 'My Sites' on the Sites directory. 'groups-personal' is the 'My Groups' tab on the Groups directory, etc.

Maybe the key is the "(not set)" item for each, suggesting that the filters that "aren't set" the most often are the least used? Maybe clear enough, but making sure.

I guess it's set up in such a way that each event is sent for each filter. I didn't mean to do it this way, but in any case, just subtract the (not set) value from the total in each category to get a sense of what you're looking at.

We could try and parse on our own which of these are groups/sites/etc, and which would be in the Featured section or the other sections, but that will likely be tedious and only go so far. It would help if we could somehow group individual links together based on the section on the page in which they appeared and were then clicked on. It's probably not this easy, but can we do this with something like CSS selector tracking via Google Tag Manager and then set up separate events in Analytics, kind of like what's discussed here?

Can you outline exactly what you're trying to track? Do you want to know "someone clicked a link in the Groups section"? Or "someone clicked a link in the Featured Groups section"? Or "someone clicked the first link in the Featured Groups section"? If I understand the level of granularity you're trying to achieve, I can make some recommendations about implementation.

I see that Google Tag Manager has all sorts of tools for using CSS collectors to create dimensions, etc. I find it totally bewildering, but if you don't, then you have my blessing to go ahead and set it up. Some of the metrics I describe in the previous paragraph can almost certainly be set up using the CSS selectors that are already there, or if you need specific ones on the links themselves, I can add that too. If, on the other hand, you are as confused by all of this as I am, then I'll just write more custom events in JavaScript as I have with other dimensions described in this ticket.

Is there also a way we can think of to parse whether a user is on the public or logged-in homepage?

In the past, we added a custom dimension to all hits indicating logged-in status. See #4518. It appears that this was not ported to the GA4 implementation. I've just done so in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/8858579ffa9b8b30842d3a945e3d349e0af53631. I pushed this to production and set up the isUserLoggedIn dimension in the GA interface. Let's see if this starts collecting data, and if it's useful for you.

Hi Boone, sorry about my delayed reply here. First off, the isUserLoggedIn dimension seems to be coming in just fine now, so we can parse data based on logged-in or not status. Sara, let me know if you want to take a look at that.

And regarding the other tracking and Google Tag Manager complexities, I've been reading up on it a little and am game to give it a try if you can give me GTM access for the Commons at my mcdonald.colin@gmail.com account. I hasten to add that I'm not certain I can get this going on my own right now, but I'd like to give it a try. If I can do it and lay out the steps for any future tracking needs, perhaps it will be more versatile and direct than the custom JavaScript event route. But I'll test and see with that access, if that's ok. Thanks!

Sounds good, Colin. I've set up GTM and have sent you an invite.