Using Google Analytics to Evaluate the Impact of the CyberTraining Project
Google Analytics (GA: http://google.com/analytics) is a useful resource for measuring and evaluating the effect for academic research. This case study provides the outputs of GA analyses and uses it to evaluate the impact of the EU-funded Cyber Training project. The Cyber Training project is a well-grounded, research-based training guide and provided to trainers though eBook (www.cybertraining-project.org). (Mc Guckin and Crowley, 2012)
According to Mc Guckin and Crowley (2012), this case is mainly about how GA potentially influences the result as a useful resource for evaluating in academic research. Exclusively, it measures the influence of the Cyber Training project by GA functioned with identifying the time of the user interrelate with online sources and the basis of all access.
This article came up with 4 figures to explain how GA works to evaluate the impact Cyber Training project.
The data has been collected from visits, pages visited, new visits, average time on site, absolute unique visits, direct traffic, referred traffic, search engines, primary sources, secondary sources, top four countries, and top content. It is kink of like what I did when I analyzed travel agents using MINT.
The first one is Dashboard. Shows the visitors and their time on the website. The second one is visitors overview. It includes all the visitors’ access information. The third one is traffic sources overview. It illustrations how many people visit the Cyber Training project and how day find it. The last one is visits came from 34 countries/territories, to present the visitors’ nationalities.
Again, the aim of the case is to confirm the evaluation provided from GA for Cyber Training project. Thus the study came up with the following result.
This shows that GA can measure the impact of Cyber Training project and it can provide suggestion for its dissemination development. It proved that GA is useful to improve different access channel for Cyber Training project other than eBook.
To sum up, in my opinion, GA can be used to evaluate the impact of website through checking the visitors’ access can be useful to company by providing data and giving references for further development.
Reference:
Mc Guckin, C. and Crowley, N. (2012) ‘Using Google Analytics to Evaluate the Impact of the CyberTraining Project’, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15(11), pp. 625–629. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0460.
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