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Apr
17

What Google Analytics can tell you about your site

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Analytics & quality assurance tools

Learn how people are using your site

Google Analytics

analytics-timelineGoogle Analytics is a powerful tool that can tell you something as simple as “How many views did my page get this month?” or as complex as “What page was the most popular last week for visitors in Seattle who used an iPhone and searched with Bing?”

Analytics is usually used to prioritize effort, to improve pages that are heavily used by many customers.  Beyond basic priorities, analytics can help assess how valuable a website is to King County business and how much staff time should be devoted to creating, maintaining and improving the website. Moreover, analytics provides clues about how well your site is working for customers-- for example, if something might not be working.

What do you need from Google Analytics?

If you need a report just once, or very infrequently, we can send you a report with the information you need. In your request, please specify: 

  • What metrics do you need?
  • What page or pages do you need a report about? (Please include URLs)
  • What time frame should the report cover?
  • Would you prefer an Excel file (Example) or a PDF (Example)?
Request a one-time report

If you find yourself needing frequent, consistent reports on your pages' statistics, we can schedule the same report be sent to you via email. Please let us know: 

  • What metrics do you need?
  • What page or pages do you need a report about? (Please include URLs)
  • What time frame should the report cover?
  • Would you prefer an Excel file (Example) or a PDF (Example)?
  • How frequently do you want an email report, and is there a particular day it should arrive?
Request a recurring report

If you've used Google Analytics or another web analytics tool before, and you'd like to have access to run reports and manipulate the data yourself, this option is for you. We have a limited number of slots we can use, so please think carefully before requesting read-access to your analytics data. If you'd like to learn more about interpreting analytics data, Google offers help with Analytics.

To request access, please let us know about:

  • How you anticipate using Analytics to help your department? 
  • A brief synopsis of your Google Analytics comfort level/knowledge
  • Do you already have a Google account to access Analytics?
  • Are you requesting a view specifically for your pages, or can you filter our primary views to drill down into your pages' data?
Request Google Analytics Access

Additional tools to improve the quality of your site

crazyegg

CrazyEgg

Heatmaps show you where people are clicking on your page. We can set you up with 1-4 pages of your site (depending on how much is left of this month's page limit). These reports will be for a short time period and will at some point be archived in SharePoint. The best pages to do are your home page or other pages with a lot of links.

Please tell us:

  • The URLs of the pages that you want to track
  • The name of the person who will access the results

Request a CrazyEgg page

CrazyEgg doesn't quite know what to do with King County's "sticky footer", and it appears in the CrazyEgg results on top of other text. If you are wondering what element is receiving clicks, the Overlay and List Reports will differentiate the results.

SiteImprove

SiteImprove

Quality assurance tool that looks for broken links, misspellings and accessibility issues. We can also build a King County dictionary of common improper wording or out of date content, such as former employee names.

We are currently testing this tool, so it only tracks 2,500 pages on kingcounty.gov, but it can be very useful for those pages. Let us set up an account for you so you can get monthly reports.

Please tell us:

  • Your site URL(s)
  • Who should get the reports
Request a SiteImprove account
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