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Web analytics

According to Wikipedia, web analytics is “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data: logfile analysis, which reads the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions; and page tagging, which uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser.

Tip

If your analytics tracker is not working, try turning debugging on and off again via index.php. The analytics code should appear in ‘View Source’.

See: Debug mode

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See also

Logfile analysis tools

These types of tools require access to the log files generated by the web server.

Page tagging tools

Important

AtoM 2.8 introduced Content Security Policy Headers which are a critical component of web security. The use of page tagging tools may require a Developer’s help to configure with the new CSP headers.

The tools found under this section require a system administrator or developer to insert a JavaScript code snippet into the relevant page in AtoM where you’d like to gather analytic data. The best known open source solutions are probably Matomo and Open Web Analytics.

You should be able to configure any solution in AtoM by editing the corresponding PHP templates.

AtoM also includes built-in integration with Google Analytics, described further below. By studying the way that the tracking snippets are incorporated into the PHP templates linked above, you should be able to make modifications as needed based on your chosen solution to implement something similar.

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Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and activity, such as session duration, pages viewed per session, bounce rates of individuals using the site, and more.

You can configure Google Analytics in AtoM by adding your tracking ID to the config/app.yml configuration file:

google_analytics_api_key: G-XXXXXXXXXX

Replace G-XXXXXXXXXX with your tracking ID. Once you are done, remember to clear the cache and restart PHP-FPM.

Google Analytics for tracking institutional pageviews

It’s also possible to track pageviews for individual institutions who are sharing a multi-repository AtoM instance by adding a custom dimension to the tracking ID. Adding this dimension will set the authorized form of name from the source culture of the repository as the dimension value (e.g. for a repository where the source culture is English but translations into other languages are present, Analytics will use the English form of the authorized form of name).

  • Description pages (all templates) use the repository value (direct or inherited)
  • Actor pages use the maintaining repository value
  • Repository pages use the repository’s authorized form of name value

Follow the instructions provided in Google’s Analytics Help pages to Create an event scoped custom dimension. When you reach step 5, Event parameter, choose page_title. Once you have completed all the steps, the custom dimension will be displayed in a table. Next, you want to navigate to your AtoM site and access all of the repositories you would like to track. This step is required so that we can use the repository’s page_title as a variable for filtering for our dimension. Note that these variables can take up to 24 hours to appear in GA4, and the following instructions will require access to these variables.

Viewing Google Analytics institutional pageview data

There are several ways to visualize analytics data in the Google Analytics dashboard. You can view institution names in the page views table:

  1. In the Google Analytics dashboard left sidebar, select Reports.

  2. Under Life cycle, select Engagement and Pages and screens.

  3. On the right hand corner, select Customize report, then Dimensions. Add the new dimension to list, and click Apply.

  4. Next, in the Customize report page, click Add filter. Select your custom dimension and set the Match Type to exactly matches, and select all repositories you would like to track in the populated list. Note that variables are made available on GA4 by accessing them in your AtoM site and can take up to 24 hours to populate in GA4.

  5. Click Apply and Save to save your changes. Notice the new filter under the Pages and screens title and can select your event in the dropdown below the table graphs.

    The Google Analytics page behaviour screen, with the secondary dimension highlighted
  6. You can export this data by clicking the Share this report button on the top right corner. Select Download File and select whether you’d prefer a Download PDF or Download CSV.

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Google Tag Manager

Like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager is a web based analytics service offered by Google, with a somewhat different focus. Tag Manager is a tag management system (TMS) that allows you to quickly and easily manage tracking and measurement codes and marketing tags (collectively known as “tags”) on a website or mobile application, without having to modify the code directly.

These can be used in AtoM to collect end-user analytics in a more granular way than Google Analytics allows on its own - for example, seeing how often a finding aid is downloaded, or how often a clipboard is saved.

The following section will walk you through set-up and configuration of Tag Manager for use in AtoM, and we’ll use tracking finding aid downloads as an example implementation.

Requirements

You’ll need to have a Google Analytics account, and your tracking ID configured to be able to visualize Tag Manager reports. You’ll also need to set up a Google Tag Manager account, to configure your containers and tags.

Let’s begin!

Google Analytics tracking ID setup

  1. If you haven’t already, log in to https://analytics.google.com with a Google account and click the “Start collecting data” button.
  2. Select Web as you platform.
  3. Fill out Website URL with your AtoM URL and click Create.
  4. Accept the service agreement that pops up. You’ll be redirected to the Tracking Code section of your new web property. Copy down the Tracking ID shown on this screen - you’ll need this to set up your Google Tag Manager variables.
The Tracking ID shown in Analytics after accepting the service agreement

Google Tag Manager container set up

  1. Log in to https://tagmanager.google.com/ with a Google account and click the “Create Account” button.

    Creating an account in Google Tag Manager

    The account will be created with a single Google Tag Manager container and you specify its name and type in the Container Setup area. You can specify it as a Web container for the AtoM functionality.

  2. Click create. You’ll be shown a service agreement, and when you click Yes to agree to its terms, you’ll be redirected to the container dashboard, which will show the code snippets for the first time. AtoM will produce these automatically from the container ID so you don’t need to copy them, and can close the dialog.

Google Tag Manager code snippets
  1. The ID for your new container will be displayed in the dashboard:

    Google Tag Manager dashboard, with the container ID highlighted in the top right corner

Note

As of GA4, the GTM ID is no longer required within the AtoM codebase and is configured to GA4 within GTM.

See: Configure GA4 in GTM

  1. Once GTM and GA4 are configured, you can start setting up tags to track events in your pages and getting reports in Google Analytics.

Tag Manager Variables

In the following example we’re going to track Click events (buttons, links, etc). First we need to enable the built-in “Clicks” variables, and make a few other configuration changes.

  1. Click “Variables” in the left sidebar and then the “Configure” button in the Built-in Variables section.
Google Tag Manager Variables configuration page
  1. Enable all the Clicks variables:
Google Tag Manager Variables configuration page
  1. We can also create a variable to store the Tracking ID of the Google Analytics web property we set up in the section above, so we can reuse it in multiple tags.

    To do so, click “Variables” in the left sidebar and then the “New” button in the User-Defined Variables section.

Google Tag Manager Variables configuration page
  1. In the Variable Configuration section, click the Lego block icon or the pencil icon to get started. In the resulting configuration page, select the Google Analytics Settings type, and set the Tracking ID of your Google Analytics web property. At the top of the page, we’ll also name the new variable “Tracking ID” so we can identify it when setting tags. When this is complete, click the “Save” button.
Google Tag Manager Variables configuration page

Tag Manager Triggers

Triggers listen to events on specific page elements and make tags react when the event is detected. We’re going to create a trigger to listen to click events on the Download button of the Finding aids section of the right-hand context menu of an archival description. Note that this button is just an HTML link element styled to look like a button. Let’s set up a trigger for this event.

  1. Click “Triggers” in the left sidebar, and the “New” button in the Triggers section.
Google Tag Manager Triggers page
  1. In the Trigger Configuration section click the circled button or the pencil icon and choose the “Just Links” trigger type under the Click category.
Google Tag Manager Triggers page - choosing the trigger type
  1. Under “This trigger fires on,” select “Some Link Clicks,” which allows you to define selectors to identify the specific HTML elements you want to track. This will depend on the markup of the page and how specific you want to be. A selector like #action-items a.btn (all links that look like a button on the right sidebar) might be good enough or #action-items a.btn[href$=".pdf"] (all links that look like a button on the right sidebar and where the href URI ends in .pdf) might be way more specific. Name the trigger “Download button” and then click the Save button at the top of the screen.
Google Tag Manager Triggers configuration panel

Tag example: tracking finding aid downloads

Now that we’ve configured our Variables and Triggers, in the following example we’re going to track how many times users click the finding aid Download button in the right context menu of an archival description. We are going to generate a report that groups all these events in the single category of “Finding Aids,” and which shows the URL of their related archival description.

  1. Click “Tags” on the left sidebar and the New button in the Tags section.
Google Tag Manager Tags landing page
  1. In the Tag Configuration section, click the tag button or the pencil icon and choose the “Google Analytics: Universal Analytics” type. For Track Type select “Event” and for the Google Analytics Setting, select your Tracking ID variable.
Google Tag Manager Tags configuration panel
  1. The Category, Action and Label tracking parameters are arbitrary values that become dimensions in the Google Analytics event reports so you can adjust them conveniently. For example, we’re going to use the URL of the archival description as the Event label, so click the Lego block button next to the field and select the “Click URL” variable.
Google Tag Manager Tags configuration panel - setting the Event label
  1. In the Triggering section click the circled button or the pencil and choose the Download button we configured in the previous section.
Google Tag Manager Tags configuration panel - choosing the trigger
  1. Finally, name your tag “Finding Aids Download” and click the Save button at the top of the screen.
Google Tag Manager Tags configuration panel - choosing the trigger

We’re almost set! Let’s preview our work and make sure everything is working as expected.

Previewing your Google Tag functionality

Before publishing your new tag you can preview its functionality by clicking the Preview button in the container dashboard. Once you’re in preview mode you can open a new tab in the same browser and visit your site.

You’ll see a Tag Manager pane at the bottom of your page.

Previewing your AtoM site via Google Tag Manager

If you click the finding aid download button of an archival description, the PDF will be open in a new tab and you’ll see a new Click event in the Summary sidebar showing that the tag was successfully fired.

Previewing a finding aid Click event on your AtoM site via Google Tag Manager

Publishing your tag and getting an Analytics event report

After you check that the tag works you can publish your workspace by clicking the “Submit” button in the Google Tag Manager Container dashboard. Set a name and description for the version changes and click the “Publish” button.

Submitting and publishing your tag in Google Tag Manager

Now you can visit your web property in Google Analytics. You can either check the Realtime > Events report:

The Realtime Events report in Google Analytics

Or the Behavior > Events reports to see the dimensions you defined being tracked.

The Behavior Events report in Google Analytics

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