Google Analytics at Page Level in Rise

I read through the LinkedIn post above, and I agree that heat mapping is useful, it's very difficult to look at heat maps for every individual user. The whole concept of analytics is to see what's trending (and what's not) and look for the outliers. Those outliers will help determine how your page may or may not require changes.

So, I've not included heat mapping in my courses. I have 50 courses and I need to be able to see trends between them and not look at the individual level. They are all published the same way. I am able to everything stated in that article, except for heat mapping - which I have an alternative.

I am using a combination of GTM (Google Tag Manager) and GA (Google Analytics), for reporting. As for heat mapping, my alternative was to create a page scroll depth indicator trigger, as well as a page timer trigger. Then I combined these in a trigger group and created one event tag that relies on that trigger. While I can't see exact clicked areas of the screen... I am able to understand how far down the user has scrolled and combine that with the time on page. That tells me whether the user is skimming or reading. 

Additionally, by building out multiple event listeners, I can capture the following: 

• Side Navigation Clicks
• Next Lesson Clicks
• Conclusion Page Event 

With these, I can review my events in GA and with secondary dimensions, understand where users are exiting, where users are slowing down. These can assist me in understanding whether my content needs to be adjusted. 

I can also create custom reports based on the individual product and see users moving from (example) Lesson 1 to Conclusion. If I see that specific metric strong, then I know the course is intuitive and easy to move through.

My recommendation with heat maps is to use them when you see a trend of people exiting a page at a specific point, or too many click events for a specific page... then add heat mapping or screen video capturing to understand what a user is experiencing. 

Hope this helps. 

Jared

Hi Heather, my primary aim is to make the education as open as possible while allowing us to track user behavior. In this case, the rise package will be exported as web only with google analytics tracking enabled and hosted within the subdomain of a SaaS product. Hence, not too concerned about locking content. In fact, i would argue the opposite and say content is a commodity that should be open and drive people towards buying or experiencing the product.

I will keep you guys posted on any breakthroughs we make on the detailed tracking effort. Meanwhile it would be a feature request for the articulate side to look at how to enable tracking by creating some kind of widget where we can enter the code in each section.

Content is now a commodity and will be more open instead of being tied to an LMS. We would expect it to be easily tracked with Google Analytics by giving it as an OOTB feature.

This issue has been in discussion for two years.  Any updates on adding modern web tracking to Rise? Ideally we would like to add technologies like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, HotJar and etc. 

Hi Akshay - I reached out to a few users who may be able to help. 

I don't really use Google analytics but it seems like you can add a custom field to the page: 

Specifying fields at creation time
An optional fields object may also be passed that allows you to set any of the analytics.js fields at creation time, so they will be stored on the tracker and apply to all hits that are sent.

 
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', 'myTracker', {
  userId: '12345'
});

And as with all calls to the ga() function, the fields object may also be used to specify all of the fields together:

 
ga('create', {
  trackingId: 'UA-XXXXX-Y',
  cookieDomain: 'auto',
  name: 'myTracker',
  userId: '12345'
});

See the create method reference for more comprehensive details.

So, in theory, you could set the optional field to the page identifier from the URL. 

https://www.rabbitoreg.com/demo/atd2017/#/list/5jQrLIuFk_JP1xPDTVmvh5e5IV_evZJa?_k=udt1j0

Whatever the "k" equals to is a unique identifier for each page. You could grab that from the URL and create the tracking based on that. 

Not tested, just an idea.

Cool idea, Zsolt! 

Thank you so much David and Zsolt.. Let me try that out and if it works, will post the results here so that everyone else can benefit from the same.

Yes!  Please post the results. 

I'm evaluating Rise right now just for this same purpose. Akshay, I'd be interested in hearing your results... and I'm curious to hear more about how you're using Rise for product training.

Are you creating links to the content directly within pages of a web-based product?

Are you able to secure the Rise pages so they can't be accessed directly through their URL without being logged into the product?

Hi Zsolt, David, Ashkay - did adding custom fields work for tracking?