Web analytics reports can provide valuable insight into your section of the CalLutheran.edu website, showing how many visitors you have, what content they're looking at, and where they come from. This data can help you understand how people are using your web pages and what you can focus on to improve their experience.
Google Analytics 4 Dashboards
How to Get Access
The current tool for tracking web analytics is Google Analytics 4, provided through a platform called Looker Studio. This tool provides an interactive dashboard with custom reports for all of the pages that pertain to your section of the website.
To access your dashboard, please submit a ticket by emailing web@callutheran.edu with the details of your request.
Example Dashboard
Tips for Using Your Dashboard
Date Range
In the upper right corner of your dashboard, you will see a default date range spanning the last 30 days. It is worth noting that this is only the default date range, and you can adjust these dates to see web traffic for any span of time.
To adjust the date range, select the drop down menu and choose a custom start date and end date.
Website Traffic Overview
Toward the top of your dashboard, a line graph plots web traffic across the selected date range, in comparison to web traffic from the previous date range. By default, these date ranges span 30 days.
If you would like to view web traffic plotted for a custom span of time, adjust the date range in the upper right corner of the dashboard.
Views vs. Total Users
It is important to consider whether your web analytics may be skewed by web activity from internal members of your team (i.e., when you browse your web pages to review content).
To avoid misleading conclusions from skewed analytics, we recommend that you disregard the Views metric. This metric gets inflated from repeat visits to a page, which can be a direct result of internal web activity. Instead, focus on the Total Users metric, which accounts for the number of different users who visit a webpage and is less inflated from internal web activity.
Sessions
In addition to the Total Users metric, the Sessions metric is often a useful metric to focus on. A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple page views, file downloads, and form submissions. The session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. So the same person could generate multiple sessions in a day, for example if they browse your website in the morning and then come back later that afternoon.