MCN2015

Keywords: Google Analytics, customised metrics, Tag Manager, event tracking, data-driven decision-making

Summary
This session gives you all you need to obtain user-data specific to the unique design of your individual services. It shows you how to get data that accurately reflects how your audiences are using the features you intended them to, beyond standard analytics data. It is illustrated with real-life examples implemented in live V&A services and describes step-by-step how to achieve it yourself when you get back.

Who should attend this session?
You, if you are responsible for designing, developing or managing digital services and want to gather user-behaviour evidence that is tailored to your specific service, beyond simplistic page views, sessions and so on. This session shows you how to get subtler stuff using well thought-out event-tracking. With the techniques described, you can do things like: compare prior motivation with actual onsite behaviour; compare the relative use of different interface elements such as navigation; review gestural interaction on touch devices to how much people scroll, zoom or tap on specific content.

Prior knowledge
This session assumes a basic working knowledge of Google Analytics (GA), but does not require expert level. It shows how carefully designed event-tracking in Analytics can give you data that is represents audience usage of your services, and shows how to implement this within the construction of your specific services. The focus is on web features and apps, but the principles and approach apply to any format. Prior experience of GA event-tracking is not required. You’ll pick up enough to show you how it’s done.Why should you attend this session?This session will show you how you can decide what evidence you capture. You will see how to get the data you really need, to make decisions based on user-behaviour evidence, not personal opinion or preferences.

What practical skills or transferrable knowledge will you take away from this session?
This session will help you understand how to get useful, hard evidence of how people really use your digital services, by pre-planning the data you need to capture at the service design stage. You will learn how to analyse your service interface and how you expect audiences to use it, to plan the reporting you will need later, and then implement data-capture that delivers the specific data you need.The takeaways from this session will be most effective when used in the service design process. However we all manage existing services too. The techniques covered here can be applied retrospectively to your already-live services.

Format
Some theory, some pragmatic technique and some audience participation… This session briefly discusses how Google Analytics event-tracking allows customisable capture of data, illustrated with examples of real-life services. It describes the advantages and limitations of the event-tracking data model. It shows how predicting how you will have to report data will help you design how you capture it. Using a prepared prototype service, the audience will be invited to suggest the most useful data to capture. Using Google Tag manager, we will then try to implement in real time some of the changes requested.

Finally, if time allows, we will take requests from the audience to look at their websites and show how data capture could be applied retrospectively