We run our website as a private member intranet and need to understand which members are accessing the site, when and for what purposes. ie forums, events, blogs, news, access published bulletins. This informaiton is key to allow us to effectively plan the strategy and functional growth path of the service to our 5000 members

ADMIN
Oleg Nesterkin (Product owner, Wild Apricot by Personify) commented December 29, 2018 3:00 AM Flag as inappropriate
This can be done by many 3rd party tools - e.g. Google Analytics.
Is there anything specific you cannot do using it?

Some of us don't WANT to use Google Analytics. It would be nice to have these features built into the website. You already track this to some degree, but don't make the results available to the paid users? Why not?

It would be brilliant to have an analytics function for use of the website. Who has logged in? What pages have they looked at, etc.

On the dashboard, you display the top 5 members who have logged in most often but there is nowhere for the administrator to see everyone who has logged in and how often. Can you please make that available?

I have used Google Analytics for years and get great results with stats and graphics on pages viewed, length of time on pages, bounce rate, source, behavior, etc., and WA documentation gives easy steps on how to integrate with Google Analytics. The only challenge I face is to eliminate counts of my own admin visits to the site, which are often lengthy and frequent. I created a filter in Google Analytics to filter out visits from my IP address; however, since IP addresses automatically change periodically, I don't often know to update the filter with my new IP address. Would love it if WA would give us a way to key in email addresses to eliminate from tracking. Is that possible?

We have been investing lots of effort to develop a third party reporting solution that works with Wild Apricot and google analytics. Check it out

Https://waxm.newpathconsulting.com/warm

I know this must be possible because my Admin dashboard lists my top 5 "Most active members". Wherever this is coming from - just to be able to click on the heading to get a full report for all members must be the work of minutes for the clever people at WA! Similarly, there is a "Longest time since last updated" table with the top 5 oldest pages with dates. It would be great to have a similar report with page hits with the option to EXCLUDE us poor busy Admins!
Google Analytics is ... um ... highly diverting but is quite hard to extract these simple but rather crucial things.
Thanks.

Yes, please! My old Network Solutions website had a statistics package included.

I erred in saying that it is not possible to exclude one's own maintenance and site-checking visits from Google stats. It is possible. Here are two introductions, and you can find more by ... Googling.

I haven't yet tested to see how easily it actually is, nor for suitability with Wild Apricot. But I'm hopeful. I'm also slightly encouraged by some other WA customers recently saying that Google's various free cloud products are easy to use. That has not always been my experience with starting from scratch. I still think overall Google (beyond mere searching) services are easy to use only if you've used it before, knowing the labels, terminology, navigation, etc.

We all tend to forget the frustrations of the learning curve, or may be unaware of them if we had a mentor.

http://www.daniloaz.com/en/5-ways-to-exclude-your-own-visits-from-google-analytics/
http://www.daniloaz.com/en/how-to-exclude-your-own-dynamic-ip-from-google-analytics/

Correction: Below, I forgot about sites I managed for several clients. Make that "... for several websites." And to the Wishlist, please add "enable editing our wishes." :-)

I have set up Google Analytics for two websites, one of them my own. I wouldn't wish it on anybody short of a dedicated webmaster. Google is notorious for its poor usability -- like driving in certain East Coast cities, it's impossible to tell where you are unless you've already been there. I've used various state reporting systems, dating back to WebTrends (which I loved).

Also, Google does not provide all the statistics mentioned in the wish. Or if it does, they're not all clearly visible and recognizable, in one place.

But most importantly, Google and virtually all other affordable or free reporting systems do not provide for excluding admin visits. If you're Lands' End or Proctor and Gamble, our own visits are statistically insignificant. But in a small organization's traffic, admin visits (including site editing, testing, and simple visits) grossly skew the stats.

WA provides a Help page on setting up Analytics. If there is any advice on how to make those statistics actually meaningful, I don't recall seeing it.

This can be done by many 3rd party tools - e.g. Google Analytics.
Is there anything specific you cannot do using it?

Provide administrators statistics for website visits, which parts of the website are visited the most (popular), and other types of website statistics so administrators can gauge public and membership interest and adjust the content/site accordingly.