Google Analytics: Reading your Users’ Stories

Brandon Pfeiffer is the Director of User Experience at RideAmigos. He manages front end development, and in order to enhance user experience, he must have access user demographics and behavior. Using Google Analytics, Brandon has been able to gather raw data to “understand what users are doing or what kind of story they are bringing to the site when they visit.”

Google Analytics – Audience Overview

Audience Overview is a tool that splits up raw data into users, sessions and pageviews. This information helps to identify the demographics of the audience – including the geographic location from which users access the website or application. Audience Overview also allows the administrator to see when users are most active. From this information, Brandon is able to identify that most users visit the site during weekdays. Therefore, he can conclude that most people using the application are concerned about their work commute, rather than traveling recreationally during the weekend.

Google Analytics – Behavior Flow

Using the Behavior Flow feature, we can see the starting pages that users view first. Then, the administrator can see the interactions they make on the website by viewing the subsequent pages they visit.

Google Analytics – Goals Tool

The Goals feature helps the administrator to track a specific metric. “We can break down and begin to see when these people are actually viewing their itinerary results, and how many people are actually following through and achieving these sorts of things.” The administrator can easily breakdown the data by viewing how many clicks are on the itinerary, and which ones users are most interested in. For example, Brandon found that people are interested in carpool and biking as their primary modes of itineraries. By examining the raw information closely, he was able to gain valuable insight into user activity. This data includes:

• The number of people looking for carpool itineraries is greater than the people looking for carpools in general.
• More people are looking at bike information than carpool information.
• The carpoolers are reviewing a lot more information than the bike users are.

Contact us to talk about how we can incorporate analytics for TDM and event tracking data to suit your individual needs.