📝 NOTE: It is assumed you know how to create custom Dashboards and Charts, and have an understanding of chart Types, Presets, and Metrics. If not, read this article before proceeding.
When building your own Dashboard Charts, you can pull data from various data sources to view different types of analytics events.
- In this article, we're going to focus on the Page Views data source, which tracks the traffic to and in your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community. For example, you can retrieve data on the numbers of unique visits, sessions, and active (logged in) users there have been.
Overview
The Page View data source tracks the page-visit activity (i.e., the "traffic") for a wide variety of the pages that make up your community site. For example, you can focus your query to retrieve data on visits to:
- articles,
- discussions,
- categories, and/or
- events
…and you can further refine the results by user-based data (e.g., user name, user ID, browser being used); category names and levels; and with the UTM parameters that are described below.
Filter Chart data
Customize what data displays in a Chart with the Group By and Filter options.
- The Group By option is available for pie graphs, line graphs, bar graphs, and tables. This is where you select whether to pull Type, Group, or User data for your chart.
- You can add Filters to your query to drill into or to exclude specific types of Group events (e.g., exclude specific users from traffic data or focus your Chart on traffic seen in a specific Group).
✔️ TIP: You can add one or multiple Group By and Filter options to dissect the data how you see fit. Generally speaking, you'll select Group By options to view a specific slice of data, and, if needed, use Filters to dig deeper.
Let's learn about the Group By and Filter options.
Article info
- Article Author: the author of the article that was viewed
- Article Name: the name of the article that was viewed
Category info
- Category Name: the name of the category that was viewed
- Category ID: the ID of the category that was viewed
Discussion info
- Discussion ID: the ID of the discussion that was viewed
- Discussion Type: the type of discussion that was viewed (Discussion, Idea, Question, Poll)
- Discussion Title: the title of the discussion that was viewed
Geographical info
- Continent: the name of the continent the page was viewed from
- Country: the name of the country the page was viewed from
- Country Code: the code of the country the page was viewed from
Event info
- Event ID: the ID of the event that was viewed
- Event Name: the name of the event that was viewed
Group info
- Group ID: the ID of the group that was viewed
- Group Name: the name of the group that was viewed
Subcommunity info
- Subcommunity Folder: the folder of the subcommunity that was viewed
- Subcommunity Locale: the locale of the subcommunity that was viewed
- Subcommunity Name: the name of the subcommunity that was viewed
- Subcommunity ID: the ID of the subcommunity that was viewed
URL info
- URL: the URL of the page that was viewed
- URL Path: the URL path of the page that was viewed (e.g., /search, /categories, /entry, /signin, /en, /fr)
✔️ TIP: Refer to UTM parameters, below, to learn how to append parameters to a URL in order to track various traffic-related metrics for that specific URL.
Referrer info
- Referrer URL: the URL of the webpage where a user clicked a link that sent them to your community
- Referrer Source: the name of the website where a user clicked a link that sent them to your community
- Here, "Other" is used for sites that don’t specify a Referrer Source
- Referrer Medium: e.g., internal, social, search, email
User info
- User Browser Family: the browser that the user used when viewing the page (e.g., Firefox, Safari)
- User Device Type: the type of device (e.g., desktop, mobile) that the user used when viewing the page
- User OS Family: the operating system of the device (e.g., Windows, Android, Mac) used to view the page
UTM parameters
UTM is short for Urchin Tracking Module. The various parameters are tags that you can append to URLs in order to track various traffic-related metrics for the URL, and then be able to analyze the effectiveness of, for example, your marketing campaigns.
UTM parameters example
You could create a call-to-action for users to check out a new event or a new category in the community.
Then, you could append UTM parameters to the URL (of the new event or category) in order to track how much traffic your call-to-action is generating.
For this example, assume a new category, Product Ideas, with a URL of:
https://demo.example.com/categories/product-ideas
Using some of the parameters described below, you could track several specific aspects of visits to the new category:
https://demo.example.com/categories/product-ideas?utm_campaign=product_2023&utm_source=cta&utm_content=homepage
- Source: append utm_source to identify the source of traffic.
- Medium: append utm_medium to identify the medium through which traffic was generated.
- Campaign: append utm_campaign to identify the specific marketing campaign that is driving traffic.
- Term: append utm_search to paid search campaigns and indicate the keywords or search terms associated with the advertisement.
- Content: append utm_content to further differentiate links within the same campaign so that you can track the effectiveness of variations of an ad or a link.
