Discover how to use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track engagement by newspaper title in your digital collection, with a step-by-step guide for both Veridian collections and other platforms.
Viewing Title-Specific Engagement Metrics in GA4 (for Veridian Clients)
Many of the libraries, universities, and cultural heritage institutions we work with want to understand which newspaper titles are most frequently engaged with in their collections. With Veridian, this insight is already built into their Google Analytics 4 (GA4) setup.
What if your collection is not on Veridian?
If you’re using Veridian, accessing stats related to specific newspaper titles is straightforward, simply follow the steps below.
- Once you’ve logged into your Analytics account, in the left-hand menu select “Reports”
- From there, select "Engagement”, followed by “Pages and screens”
- Scroll down past the graph to locate the drop-down box set to “Page path and screen class”. Click the downward pointing arrow and change this to “Content group”
- You should now see a list of titles and corresponding metrics, including number of views, active users, views per user and average engagement time.
Helpful tips:
- Can’t see a title? Try expanding your date range.
- What is “General page view”? These are pages such as your collection homepage, browse pages, or search pages, rather than specific newspaper titles.
What if my digital newspaper collection isn’t in Veridian?
If your historic newspaper collection is not housed within Veridian, then there are a couple of key steps you’ll need to take in order to start tracking title level metrics in your Google Analytics:
- Ensure each issue page exposes the newspaper title in the <head> of the HTML. For example:
<meta name="newspaper-title" content="The Daily Press"> - Modify your GA4 setup (either in gtag.js or via Google Tag Manager) so that the value of the newspaper title is sent with every page_view event. For example:
gtag('event', 'page_view', {
content_group: 'The Daily Press'
});
GA4 automatically uses the content_group parameter to populate the Content group dimension in the “Pages and screens” report. No custom dimension setup is required if you stick with this parameter.
Once implemented, you’ll be able to navigate to “Reports” > “Engagement” > “Pages & screens” in GA4. From there select 'Content group" from the drop down selection to see the engagement metrics for each newspaper title in your collection.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about tracking the performance of specific newspaper titles in your Veridian collection.