"Reporting" tab coming to LiveWhale — what would you like from it?

Hi friends,

We are asked a lot if LiveWhale (Calendar or CMS) does reporting. As you all probably know, we support and encourage use of analytics tools and Google Tag Manager for most tracking and reporting; it’s also easy to generate widgets to answer common questions like “How many events did groups X and Y create in 2023?”

But we’ve decided that LW ought to do more than that, so we’re looking at introducing a separate Reporting tab. There are a variety of content reporting functions and tools in LW that can be gathered under this heading. But Karl and I wanted to reach out directly to you guys. Let me ask:

If LiveWhale had a Reporting page, what would you use it for? What sorts of reports are you asked, or would you like, to provide?

We’d love to know anything you might care to share with us about the kinds of reports you’d like to be able to generate within LiveWhale. Thanks!

Jason

Off the top of my head, brainstorming quickly:

Analytics

  • Fundamentals of Google Analytics: specifically pageviews and aggregate flow between pages (click on page A leads to page B X times, and vice versa), including dynamic content (stories, etc).
  • Tracking the use of search and Quick Access.
    • Perhaps also enabling tracking of widgets making use of a search input/parameter to filter results?
  • Tracking clicks off site, and to where. (with focus on institutional resources, like click to apply)
  • Option to make this data available for editors to see per page/item, as before with UA, as a quick overview of how their content is doing.
  • User privacy? Maybe in parallel, some standardized implementation of consent, either in CMS or common integrations?

Meta

  • Number of pages/blurbs/profiles sitewide which have not been updated in the past X months, as well as a list, sortable/filtered by group.
  • Number of events/stories which are older than Y years, but are still active, as well as a list, sortable/filtered by group.
  • Number of original events/stories created, in each group, in a given timeframe.
  • Number of events/stories added (owned or copy), in each group, in a given timeframe.
  • Statistics on each editor, in a given timeframe, to judge activity broadly over time. (items made, edits made, number of days logged in, etc)
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For LW Calendar I’d love to have access to basic Google analytics directly in the admin module - users, sessions, pageviews, bounces, average session time, pages per session, new users - as well as the number of events submitted & published to the calendar. All metrics should be filterable by group and by custom date range. It would be nice if reports were exportable both in raw CSV format and as a PDF with prettier formatting - so admins can easily generate a nice-looking report to share with leadership or in a presentation without manual data manipulation and formatting.

Thanks for adding this important feature!

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I’m sure we’ll have more coming but one of our people has asked for most viewed content, and a list of content created during some time range, filterable by group, showing how often each item was viewed.

-= G =-

I’m not sure if you are wanting to replicate too much GA functionality, but something we tend to get asked for is campaign URL (URLS with UTM parameters) performance. People want to know how many people are clicking their campaign links, and this has gotten more difficult to get easily in GA4.

Something else that might be nice (and more LW-centric) is user reporting. Like most/least active users, users that haven’t logged in or made any edits in a specified time period.

Or what about search terms? What terms have people been typing in the search box on our site and/or in the calendar.

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I’d upvote both user activity and search terms…

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This may be wishful thinking, but we could really use some reporting on images. Specifically, unused images (images that are not used in any content types or added to any pages). We have so many old images that I am hesitant to delete for fear they are used somewhere I am unaware of.

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Similarly, an “orphaned pages” report would be useful. Pages that are Live but not linked to from any other pages or content.

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Search terms-- great idea.

Thanks for considering this! I’d love reporting focused on unused content like files and images, since those can’t be tracked any other way except looking at pages and checking ids manually. We have quite a few things that are either outdated or maybe accidentally uploaded twice, but no easy way to see which one’s the active one, so deleting isn’t possible without manual sleuthing. A report that sees whether specific file/image ids are linked/embedded/used in a widget somewhere would be perfect for cleaning up unnecessary content.

We use GA4, but internal stats for all livewhale pages and stories would be great too. I know we have some tracking that shows up on a group dashboard, but reporting that has view/click analytics on all pages across all groups, as well as restricted by group, and with specific access permissions like current granular dynamic items access for users would be great. Admins could see everything, users could see their own group’s detailed stats without needing to go outside of livewhale.

Group based stories analytics would be especially useful since all stories have the same source path, and can’t be easily segmented in GA4 by normal users.

Following the stats page and sort of along the same lines of unused content reporting, having reporting on pages that were created but never/rarely used (no clicks/no links) like Jon’s suggestion would be great as well. I try to clean up unsued page sprawls occasionally but it’s all very manual currently.