Agenda

• [Michael] Updates:
  • Recommendations: added iWG Team
  • Project page: showing list of associated iCAP Teams only to logged in users
  • Recommendations search page:
    • Only showing links for Recommendations; made the rest plain text
    • Added column for latest Recommendation Update status
  • Trimmed down content in Project Updates listings so they're easier to scan:
    • Before: associated projects, full description, public & private files, notes, visibility
    • Now: associated projects, summary description, notes, visibility
    • Open to feedback!
  • Project page: "Add Project Update" and "Add new Metric" links on Project page now auto-fill the current Project!
  • Recommendation page: "Add Recommendation Update" on Recommendation page now auto-fills the current Recommendation!
• Continue discussion of new Recommendations process
• (Time permitting) Discussion of how to handle projects with large numbers of metrics (see notes from Sarthak & Michael's discussion)

Discussion

• Project Updates listings: can descriptions expand/collapse instead of just truncating?
• New Recommendations process
  • Recommendations:
    • For description, enter summary of recommendation rather than iWG assessment
    • Add files column to Recommendation Updates table
    • Michael will investigate ways to show more of the story for each recommendation (incl. teasers w/expandable descriptions?)
    • Description field: "Original Recommendation" heading
    • Keep Recommendation Updates listing reverse chronological
    • Move Supplanted By box up to second position, right after iCAP Team
  • Recommendation Updates:
    • Use status at the time of the update rather than current status
    • For titles, use descriptive sentence rather than single word status
• Sheri: duplicate locations in iCAP Portal
  • Send list to Michael; he'll merge them
• SSC embed on ECE kiosks - will that become out of date with new SSC Projects approach?
  • We could potentially use the SSC embed, or a variation on it
  • Joyce Mast has retired; Catherine Somers is the current contact
• May want to add SSC and possibly Public Affairs recognition to footer
• Embeds: add card option for listings
• Discussion of how to handle projects with large numbers of metrics

TODOs

• ✅ Update Add Project Update links on Project Header Layout projects
• ✅ Project Updates listings: can descriptions expand/collapse instead of just truncating?
• ✅ Recommendation pages:
  • ✅ Show most recent status prominently
  • ✅ Description field: "Original Recommendation" heading
  • ✅ Move Supplanted By box up to second position, right after iCAP Team
• ✅ Merge duplication locations
• ✅ Sort Recommendation Updates listing alphabetically (also look into adding sort options)
• Investigate ways to show more of the story for each recommendation (incl. teasers w/expandable descriptions?)
• Michael will reach out to Sheri to get SSC Projects embed working on SSC website
• ✅ Update SSC link on iCAP Portal homepage to go to SSC Projects page
• May want to add SSC and possibly Public Affairs recognition to footer
• Embeds: add card option for listings

This is likely due to the change in Google Analytics’ reporting system. They moved from “Universal Analytics” (UA) to “Google Analytics 4” (GA4) which included a significant change in the way they count things like pageviews. It’s not exactly that the numbers we had before were inaccurate, nor that the new numbers are inaccurate, it’s that they’re being counted in a different way. Here are 2 major differences:

1. UA tracked each device as a user; GA4 tries to track the same person across multiple devices (e.g. phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer)
2. UA would count the same person visiting on different days as different users; GA4 will track the same person visiting multiple times as a single user in a given report. So if you ran a report for 2 days, the same person visiting twice would count as 2 users in UA, but only 1 user in GA4. Now expand this out to an annual report, and you can imagine how the numbers can become much lower if you have a fair number of repeat visitors.
3. GA4 may be doing a better job of honoring browsers’ Do Not Track requests, plus over time more people may be using extensions that block 3rd-party cookies and traffic, like Google Analytics.

To demonstrate how point #2 above can lower our numbers, here are some tables comparing longer-term reporting periods with sums of shorter-term reporting periods:

Monthly vs. Annual

Comparison:

• Total users in single report from Jul 1, 2023 to Jun 30, 2024: 24,548
• Difference between reporting methods: 1,190
• % more users when broken down by month: 5%

Daily vs. Monthly

Comparison:

• Total users in single report from Oct 1, 2023 to Oct 31, 2023: 2,579
• Difference between reporting methods: 580
• % more users in October 2023 when broken down by day: 22.5%

For anyone who’s interested, here’s a bit more information about the differences between UA and GA4:

• [GA4] Differences in user counts
• GA4 Users vs UA Users
• The trouble with Users in GA4

I hope that helps explain some of the difference. I am surprised the number dropped in half – that is a pretty substantial change. If you’d like, I can spend some time delving into that in more detail to see if there’s something going on, but my hunch is that it’s mostly attributable to the change in the way Google Analytics records and reports its data. I’m not an expert at Google Analytics; if you know anyone who’s good at analyzing Google Analytics reports, we could invite them to take a look and see what they notice.

</Michael>

Michael McKelvey

Office for Mathematics, Science, & Technology Education