A few weeks ago I posted a blog on using Mixpanel, Looker and Google BigQuery to analyze listener data from the Drill to Detail website, with Mixpanel tracking individual episode play events by visitors to the site and Fivetran replicating that event data over to BigQuery for analysis using Looker.

Mixpanel is great but like most digital businesses using Google Analytics (GA) to analyze and measure activity on their website, we actually use Google Tag Manager and GA events to track visitor activity on the mjr-analytics.com website. Whilst a full site license for Google Analytics 360 is way beyond our budget right now, the free version of GA together with GTM provides us with an unsampled, event-level stream of visitor events and together with goals and simple A/B testing tools a way to start optimizing the content on our site.

Couple all of this with Fivetran and Looker and we can start to do some interesting analytics on all this data to not only count sessions, visitors and pages viewed but also start looking at visitor retention and the routes those visitors take through the various features on our website.

Events in Google Analytics are a way of recording interactions visitors to your site make with items on a page such as selecting an item on a navigation menu, clicking on a download link or seeing a special offer or product recommendation. On the mjr-analytics.com website we’ve setup events, for example, to record how far down the page a visitor scrolls so we can see how many people actually scroll past the hero image on our front page and look at the content on Looker services, Oracle services and so on.