January 2022 Website Meeting

Notes

Tutor Connection follow-up

We began our meeting with a quick follow-up to the Tutor Connection initiative that had been discussed in previous meetings. As of right now, everything is set up and ready to go, although the page with the details and sign-up form is not currently being highlighted on the “Student Resources” page just yet. Nikky informed us that the school will begin promoting the initiative starting on Monday, at which time everything should be published and visible on the site.

Looking at Google Analytics and Data Studio

Our other big topic for discussion was looking at Data Studio. Nikky had some questions and concerns that she wanted to discuss.

The first topic was about large segments of traffic being marked as “Not set” in a couple of the graphs in the report. While we’re not 100% sure about what the definitive causes are for this, a likely reason has to do with privacy settings in modern browsers. Google Analytics hasn’t been able to adapt well to more privacy-focused browsers, or those browsers who disable a lot of tracking methods, and therefore the reports can’t accurately reflect all of the statistics on our sites’ visitors.

Along those lines, Bill mentioned that he would like to explore new ways of including things like effective URL parameter in the links that get used in various places, like email, to better help with the reporting that Data Studio does.

Nikky then pointed out that Google was the dominant segment when it came to the “Search acquisition” pie chart, and wondered if the school should look into investing in some Google Ads because of this.

We also looked at the list of popular pages according to the report that Bill had shared. In the top 10 of that list is “Page Not Found” or the 404 page. We discussed what could be the likely cause of this. Outdated News stories is a consistent culprit across all of the campus’s websites, so that is a possibility. Nikky also pointed out that another cause could be the recent department restructuring the school took on in the past year. External sources might still be linking to old URLs. Even current staff might still have out-of-date links in their email signatures, and that could also be another source.

Other project updates

Nikky also asked if there were any new updates concerning the big development initiatives the web team is undertaking, but with the holiday break taking up much of the month since our prior meeting, there wasn’t anything new or major to report just yet. Dan reassured everyone that as the projects progress, the web team will be eager to have Nikky, Jessica, and others review them and provide us with any feedback that would help make the tools better.