Tracking User Behavior with Google Analytics Events on an Academic Library Website

The primary purpose of an academic library website is to serve as a portal to library-acquired content. Navigational design of a library website affects the user’s ability to find and access content. At Albertsons Library, the goal of the navigational design of the website is to mimic user behavior on the website to help them access information and articles from over 300 different library vendors. Coordinating with different vendors makes tracking the navigational flow of user behavior difficult with the tool Google Analytics. Using the events feature in Google Analytics, the team responsible for web design was able to track user flow, and was able to quantify how many users were actual “drop-offs” versus those that were clicks into library resources. Decisions made after acquiring this data resulted in a website with a 10 percent or less bounce rate, and decreased the number of clicks required for users accessing the library's content.