📝 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 in this article.
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.
📝 NOTE: These options can be used both to group and filter data.
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 on which 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.
"Other" in Referrer reporting
When viewing Referrer data, you may see "Other" listed. This means one of three things:
- The page view occurred before Vanilla started tracking this data.
- The page view did not have a referrer (the user navigated directly to your community).
- The referrer did not provide the information (Referrer Source or Referrer Medium is null).
To learn learn how to add referrer parameters to a link URL in order to capture referrer data, see:
Also, check out the Page views by referrer chart that is provided with the out-of-the-box Traffic dashboard.
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 info
These are parameters that are appended to URLs in order to capture various traffic-related click activity for links that host the URL.
- UTM Source: the site that sent the traffic (e.g., google, facebook).
- UTM Medium: the type of link was used (e.g., cost-per-click, email).
- UTM Campaign: the promotion or campaign with which the link is associated (e.g., black_friday, spring_sale).
- UTM Term: the keywords or search terms associated with an advertisement (e.g., running+shoes); typically used in paid search campaigns.
- UTM Content: the element or item that was clicked (e.g., a banner ad or a text link); helps to differentiate multiple links in one campaign to determine the effectiveness of variations of a link.
To learn how to add UTM parameters to a link URL in order to capture click activity, see:
To learn about how Vanilla simplifies tracking your Email Digest engagement with default UTM parameters, see:
