At work, we use Sungard HE‘s Luminis portal (v3.3) — It’s been good to us over the years, but there’s a lack of usage information regarding users’ roles and their interactions with Luminis.

In the past, we’ve added Google Analytics to Luminis to track the interactions, but never managed to fully segment user roles. Until now.

Out of the box, Luminis has roles such as staff, student, faculty, ProspectiveStudent etc. Users can have one or more of these roles and other custom roles too. If we could capture all the roles and pass them onto Google Analytics, then we’d be able to fully segment the user types and gain a better understanding of how each segment uses Luminis.

This post aims to show how this is possible in just 3 steps:

1. XSL: Edit nested-tables.xsl to add a custom meta tag for the luminis roles
2. Javascript/jQuery: Read the custom meta tag and set a custom variable in Google Analytics
3. Google Analytics: Create custom segments to view traffic for specific Luminis roles

Edit nested-tables.xsl and add a custom meta tag to the header

We’ve seriously hacked at nested-tables.xsl over the years, so our version of the file is likely to be different to most. The main aim here is to find the html > head section and add a custom meta tag:

<!-- Dump all roles into a single meta tag as a comma separated value -->
<meta name="luminis.role">
   	<xsl:attribute name="content">
		<xsl:for-each select="//layout/cp:cpInfo/cp:cpProperty[@name='pdsRole']/child::*">
			<xsl:value-of select="concat(., ',')" />
   		</xsl:for-each>
   	</xsl:attribute>
</meta>

Read the custom meta tag and set a custom variable in Google Analytics

Our implementation of Google Analytics is a little complex, but this example I’ve based on the standard Google Analytics example code.

Using Javascript (infused with jQuery in our case), we can read the custom meta tag and set a custom variable.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">

	window.onload = function(){
		try
		{
			var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-XX");

			if (typeof $('meta[name=luminis.role]').attr("content") == 'string')
			{
				pageTracker._setCustomVar(
				     1,                                                // This custom var is set to slot #1 of the 5 available in GA
				     "luminis.role",                                   // The name acts as a kind of category for the user activity
				     ','+$('meta[name=luminis.role]').attr("content"), // The value of the custom variable (starting with a comma)
				     2                                                 // Sets the scope to session-level
				);
			}
			pageTracker._trackPageview();
		}
		catch (err) {}
	}

</script>

According to the documentation, it’s important to set the custom variable before tracking the page view.

Create custom segments to view traffic for specific Luminis roles

Sign in to Google Analytics and view your normal website reports.
Click on Advanced segments | Create a new advanced segment

Create a new segment where…
Custom variable (Value 1) contains ,staff,
AND
Custom variable (Value 1) contains ,faculty,

Note the surrounding commas – we’re using them as role delimiters.

Give the segment a name e.g. “Luminis roles: staff AND faculty”"

All done, but have patience

Your custom segment is now available from the advanced segment drop-down:

Custom variables seem to take longer to filter through to Google Analytics than normal data such as page views. So come back in a couple of days and try out your new advanced segment.

Update (12 April 2010):
Shortly after I published this post, the Google Analytics blog posted their webinar on Google Analytics custom variables.

Also, if you’re interested in creating advanced segments from custom variables, I’ve posted ayoutube video that steps through the process.

Here are the slides from a talk I gave at the European Luminis User Group in Nottingham last week.

Outlined are some thoughts behind reusable UI elements in the Luminis portal at the University of Nottingham.

Since I last added Google Analytics to a website, Google have changed from the old urchin.js file to the shiny new ga.js file. This means that I really ought to start using ga.js now.

The University of Nottingham uses Sungard’s Luminis portal system which produces some rather nasty looking URLs. Web analytics for this is rather a handful – bad URLs, multiple features per page (each of which we’d like to track) and often tracking would be nice across sub-domains.

With that in mind, and Google’s Tracking Code Migration Guide close at hand, I’ve written jGoogleAnalytics.js to allow me to track:

• clicks events
• form submit events
• cross subdomain
• cross domain (e.g. for eCommerce payment gateways hosted externally)
• new organic search engines
• all the features of Jason Huck’s GA jQuery integration

Download jGoogleAnalytics.js

Usage:

// At it's simplest
$.jGoogleAnalytics( 'UA-XXXXXX-X');

// More advanced version
$.jGoogleAnalytics(
	'UA-XXXXXX-X', // Your GA tracker code
	{
		anchorClick: false, // adds click tracking to *all* anchors
		clickEvents: null, // e.g. {'.popup': '/popup/nasty'}
		crossDomainSelector: false, // e.g. 'a.crossDomain'
		domainName: false, // e.g. 'nottingham.ac.uk'

		evalClickEvents: null, // e.g. {'#menu li a': "'/tabs/'+ $(this).text()"}
		evalSubmitEvents: null, // e.g. {'#menu li a': "'/tabs/'+ $(this).text()"}

		extensions: [
		'pdf','doc','xls','csv','jpg','gif', 'mp3',
		'swf','txt','ppt','zip','gz','dmg','xml'
		], // download extensions to track

		external: '/external/', // prefix to add to external links
		mailto: '/mailto/', // prefix to add to email addresses
		download: '/download/', // prefix to add to downloads

		organicSearch: null, // e.g. {'search-engine': 'query-term', 'google.nottingham.ac.uk': 'q'}
		pageViewsEnabled: true, // can be disabled e.g. if only tracking e.g. click events
		sampleRate: null, // e.g. 50 - set the sample rate at 50%
		submitEvents: {'#personUK': '/personsearch/uk'}
	}
);

I’ve not added any eCommerce tracking to this release as we simply don’t have the need for it.

If you use this script, pplease leave a comment!