982042 - Add GA Event Tracking to Carousel on Homepage

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: webmaker.org, defect)

Description

[Adam Lofting (:adamlofting)]

To understand how people interact with the carousel on the homepage we should add Google Analytics Event Tracking using the existing processes in place on webmaker.org and the webmaker-analytics bower module. 

This data will be used to inform design decisions about the upcoming Maker Party homepage.

I suggest we track 2 types of events on this page:

1) Interaction events when the user clicks the arrows to manually scroll through the images
2) Non-interaction events when the page automatically scrolls through the images

Comment 1

[Gavin Suntop [:gvn]]

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/auto-forwarding/

Comment 2

[Pomax]

I'm going to recommend not bothering with this. It's a carousel, most people will never go to the next image (I didn't even realise it was a carousel until this bug). I thought it was simply a random "testimonial" graphic divider we picked at pageload time.

Comment 3

[Erika Drushka]

This bug stemmed from me wanting to know how effective carousels are for communicating text and/or images. There's an assumption that people don't click though, which affects if and how they should be used (and, consequently, forces me to think more carefully about overall placement of copy). Would love to see some data to back up common assumptions, but this is certainly not a priority.

Comment 4

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

I have a feeling other people have already done this.

Carousels are not something we invented, and I am sure we can find research on this topic.

Comment 5

[Brett Gaylor [:brett]]

http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

Comment 6

[Erika Drushka]

Ahem. Yet you are using one.

I still think stats on the webmaker.org homepage in particular could be useful as we design the Maker Party pages (and others to come). From a comms perspective, carousels will remain an appealing option to display the abundance of quotes and images that are central to our messaging. 

Is the problem that GA is hard to set up for this?

Comment 7

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

It is not hard to set up. It is actually really easy, but can take some time to get significant results. Weeks or months depending on the thing and traffic.

We are tracking the various search buttons, and all the menu buttons and links.

Carousel should be removed.

Comment 8

[Adam Lofting (:adamlofting)]

My previous testing on carousels mostly aligns with those linked articles and research, but I was going to let the data speak for itself :)

Saying that, I did *one* time find a carousel that out-performed a static call to action in structured tests. So, I'm inclined to test things "for real" with our audience if I can. 

If we could add this tracking to the homepage quickly it would only take a few days to know for sure if, for example, less than 1% of people engage with this. The homepage has decent traffic.

I expect that almost no-one clicks the links (like Pomax, I didn't realise you could before now), but it would also be interesting to know if people stay on the page long enough to even see the images scrolling automatically.

This overlaps with a separate conversation that happened on email recently about page load times when split out by country. The avg. page load time of the webmaker homepage in India for example (our second biggest country audience for that page) is 22 seconds. So it's good to evaluate the 'weight' of something on the page againsts its 'cost'.

Comment 9

[Adam Lofting (:adamlofting)]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/pull/664

So... though we expect this carousel data isn't going to be very surprising, this seemed like a simple enough bug for me to have a go at the full contribution process.

Here's my first webmaker PR :)

Comment 10

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Comment on attachment 8399493 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/pull/664

I'm not around for two weeks. Moving this off me.

Comment 11

[Pomax]

Comment on attachment 8399493 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/pull/664

for some reason the carousel library is breaking travis. That'll need a fix before we can land this.

Comment 12

[Adam Lofting (:adamlofting)]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/pull/664

Thanks. Travis builds now. I needed to run grunt to beautify it.

I'll look out for that in the future :)

Comment 13

[Adam Lofting (:adamlofting)]

Thanks Pomax

What are the next steps to land this? Does this need further input from me?

Comment 14

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org

https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/commit/56eb7379e49dbde51ebf94ecdde422ffb2410f94
Merge pull request #664 from adamlofting/bug982042

GA Event Tracking on Carousel ( bug982042 )