Google Analytics with Mendix
Numerous Web tools help to collect data on websites. Among those tools, the most popular and free service that websites can use is Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to track and understand your client’s behavior, user experience, online content, device functionality, and further.
It helps to analyze user interactions on your website and helps to improve and ensure the success of the business. You could use Google Analytics on any site to understand the behavior of your visitors and deliver better results.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service used to track website performance providing information with basic statistics and analytics tools.
The Benefits of using Analytics:
· Monitor your visitors and users
· Optimise your website
· After analyzing the web data, we can have our marketing plan
· Predict future trends
· Keep track of the competition
How Google Analytics Works:
There are four major components in Google Analytics
Data collection:
The first thing you will need to do is to create a Google Analytics account, and then add a tracking code to your project, we will be covering this initial setup (how-to) in a later part of the blog, for now, let’s get to know it works.
· The Tracking code is a small piece of code that Google Analytics uses to track your website visitors and any action they perform while they were on your site. This piece of code is made up of JavaScript and it looks something like this
· How it works — once a user arrives at a website, the JavaScript code starts to collect pieces of information about your website some of the information that it can collect: the URL, web browser, browser language, operation system, IP address, location, etc.
· When the user visits your sites, Google Analytics will drop a cookie in the user’s browser, cookies are just small files that contain information about the user's activities.
· Now by using those cookies Google Analytics will know how the user behaved on your sites. Then it collects that information to show you the different reports.
· This makes it easy to track traffic on a single domain URL or subdomain default. However, if you consider the same default tracking code on pages with different domains, Analytics will count user and session separately. If you need to track user sessions across the different domains, you need to set up cross-domain tracking.
· With each user interaction on your website, the analytics tracking code sends updates as to how the user interacts with your site, referred to as “hits”, to Google Analytics.
· A hit is a URL parameter string, the parameters contain useful information about your users. If we break down the code, we can see the Unique Identifier passed into the string. This will help Google Analytics to differentiate between the new user and returning users.
Processing & Configuration:
· Once the collected data reaches the Google Analytics service via “hits” it moves to the next step of data processing,
· At this stage, the raw data collected gets turned into more sensible information.
· Data processing relies on configuration, at this stage, the configurations you determine are applied to the raw data. We can also apply filters to the data. For example, you may want to apply a filter to the sales data of a company and look for all the sales which have been done using an employee discount.
Reporting:
· Reporting is the final component of the Google Analytics platform; Google provides a web interface that you can use to create a report.
Get started with Analytics:
- Go to google.com/analytics > Create or sign in to your Analytics account:
2. Do one of the following:
- To create an account, click Start for free.
- To sign in to your account, Click Sign into Analytics.
3. The next step is to create an Admin account and set a property. Our tracking code has been generated here.
Property id was your tracking code.
4. Import the Google Analytics widget into your Mendix project.
Widget configuration:
Event tracker widget
Google Analytics Marketplace module: https://marketplace.mendix.com/link/component/105
You can make use of the Event tracker widget to collect data on custom events. An event hit has four parameters: Action, Category, Label, and Value. You can use this to categorize interaction in reports specific to the website.
Event tracker Button widget:
With the help of this widget, microflow actions can be performed in which the widget takes care of the hits. In the behavior tab, you can configure it so that data will be transferred only when the developer enables the button.
Dashboard Overview:
The raw data collected from the hits have been processed and converted into valuable information and represented in the Analytics dashboard. The above screenshot shows the insights of pages and screens such as, how many times it has been viewed, how many users have accessed the page etc.
Conclusion:
Time and again we’ve learned that the most assured way of succeeding in the marketing world is by understanding your customers. However, you’ll also need to create ways to stay ahead of the competition and understand the changing trends among the guests of your website in time. If that’s the case it’s hard without the right tools. I mean — it’s nearly unattainable to stay ahead of the competition and comprehend your guests all at the same time. With the help of the wonderful features that are available in these tools, it’s easier to identify what exactly is going awry on the website. There are many colorful creative ways you can take to improve your website, but without a clear suggestion of what’s wrong, it becomes delicate to finalize an action plan.
Make use of the Analytics and stay ahead of your challengers. Lead the Market.
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