Using Google Analytics for Improving Library Website Content and Design: A Case Study

As more and more digital content goes online, libraries today are fundamentally different than they were as recently as five years ago. Websites have become an essential component of library service, and designing these websites involves both technical and administrative decision-making. During the past five years, the Rutgers-Newark Law Library (RNLL) has used different methods to figure out exactly what our visitors are looking for on our website. Recently, we used Google Analytics to track our visitors' behaviors, and pinpointed the motivations behind their information-seeking. The visually enhanced reports by Google Analytics provided information on where visitors came from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed on each page, how deep into the site they navigated, where their visits ended, and where they went from there. By analyzing the data from Google Analytics, we made changes to our website and compared web usage data from before and after the changes, concluding that our website was improved in a number of ways.