“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.” - Mark Twain
Angelfish
Angelfish is the name of our web statistics software. It provides you with traffic information about your site, like how many people have visited in the last month, which pages are most popular, or how many times the minutes from your last School Council meeting have been downloaded (probably billions).
How to Login to Angelfish
Angelfish doesn't require Editor or Approver permissions like the rest or your website. It is accessible to all school staff.
To access your school website stats in Angelfish:
- Use Google Chrome or Firefox (Angelfish doesn't swim well with Internet Explorer)
- Visit: https://angelfish.cbe.ab.ca/
- Enter the username and password. You can find it on the School Bundle Training page in Staff Insite (only available to CBE employees).
- If all goes well, you should arrive at the Angelfish User Home screen
- In Available Profiles, click on the profile name link that corresponds to the first letter of the first word of the name of your school (unless you're The Hamptons, in which case you should use the second, more significant, word). For example, choose the U-Z profile for William Aberhart (W), or the P-T profile for anything starting with Sir (S). Click on the Profile Name that has been populated in the Profile Information pane.
This is Not Your Destiny
After you choose the profile for your school, you'll land on Profile Home on the Dashboard page. Select Main Dashboard. Don't get too excited... the numbers probably don't mean what you may think they mean:
The Dashboard page shows combined statistics for all of the schools in the profile. It does not show the information specific to your school
The same is true for the Totals box displayed at the top of each page and in the Traffic section of Angelfish:
You can't view overview information just for your school in the Dashboard page, Traffic section, or Profile Snapshot widget. These always display aggregate information for all the schools in your alphabet-group profile.
The good news is that you can get the information you need (including traffic information like how many of your visitors are viewing your site on a mobile device, how long visitors are staying on your site, or how many found your site from Google Germany) just by digging around a little bit.
Q: What in the world would make you think that I want to see combined statistics for all the schools whose names just happen to be in the same part of the alphabet as mine?!?
A: We don't. But it saves the system a lot of money by using shared profiles instead of purchasing an individual profile for each school, and allows us to still give you access to a high-quality tool to manage your site.
Please note that this is the section of the page that we'll reference when someone (else) sends us a question about why the stats for their site don't match what they see in the Profile Snapshot. Thankfully, you had the good sense to read this so you don't have to ask. Well done!
So, unless you're curious about how you did as a group of schools ("Go,Team UVWXYZ, Go!"), let's move on to accessing stats for just your school site.
Know Where You're Going
Before you start, it's important to know where to find the information you'll need most often (more details on what the numbers mean and exactly how to access them in the sections below).
Go to Content - Page Titles to find out:
- How many visitors has our site had?
- Which pages were viewed the most (or least) often?
- How long did visitors spend on our site?
- .. and many more details about those numbers like how many were on a mobile device, whether they came to your site directly, followed a link, or used a search engine, and more...
Go to Content - Pages to find out:
- The same type of information as Page Titles above, but related to specific URL strings - good for searching for specific pages or sections of your site.
Go to IT Reports - Downloads to find out:
- How many people downloaded my documents (PDFs)?
Using the Filter
You can get rid of all those other (pesky) schools and focus on the stats for your school using the Filter function in the Content or IT Reports sections of Angelfish. We'll use it in several of the examples on this page. It looks like this.
To use it, just enter your school name (all lowercase) the way it appears in your website URL (you can find it right after "school/").
You can also drill down (without filtering) into the reports to see specific results for your site (check out the instructions below).
Analytics Reports
Here are a few of the key statistics you may be interested in, and how to access each.
Overall Traffic: Pageviews, Visits & Unique Views
These general stats are a great place to start understanding how (and how much) your site is being used.
Pageviews show how much overall traffic your site gets. A pageview is recorded each time a page is (*spoiler*) viewed (*end spoiler*). Why use pageviews instead of "hits"? Hits don't actually correspond to pages, but to individual items on the page, so if a visitor looks at a page with 30 images on it, it may count as 30 hits, but only one pageview. For the question we're usually asking (how many people have looked at this?), pageviews provides a much better indication.
Visits consist of a series of pageviews that a single visitor makes during a period of activity. In some cases, it may consist of only one pageview, but in most cases a visit helps paint a picture of each journey a visitor makes in your site. A visit ends after the visitor either closes the browser, clears cookies, or is inactive for 30 minutes.
Unique Views bring together the ideas of pageviews and visits to show how many visits included that page. Why should you care? Imagine that one visitor came back to your site each day for 30 days to check for updated content, but another visited the site once and then hit "refresh" in their browser 30 times in 30 seconds. If you rely on pageviews alone to tell the story over the last 30 days, the statistics for these two users would be identical. Leveraging unique views helps you to understand much more about how your site is being used.
How to Access Overall Traffic Stats
Open the Content menu, Content Pages, and click on Page Titles. You'll see a list of the schools in your profile group. The ones with the most pageviews on their site are listed first, so do a little happy dance if you can find your school without scrolling down:
You can see your overall site traffic (how many pageviews your site has had) beside your school name:
Who Do You Love? Top Pages
Which pages in your site are viewed the most? How many views have they had? You can find out by checking your top pages.
The Top Pages report shows you the number of pageviews and unique views for each page in your site, but also sheds some light on how people are arriving at your site (Landings) and the last thing they see before they leave (Exits).
Landings are recorded for a page whenever a visit begins with that page. Most of the links to your site lead to your homepage, and a general Google search for just your school name will usually return your home page as the top result, so you'll usually see an overwhelming number of landings for your home page.
Exits are recorded for a page when a visit ends with that page (before the user either closes their browser or goes to another site). When you see a page with a large number of exits, it often means that the user found the information they were looking for on that page (so they didn't need to go further). Sometimes, though, it can mean that they didn't find what they expected on that page, and couldn't find any clues or links to get them any closer to their objective, so they gave up and left.
How can you apply this information? Here are some things to consider:
- If a page has many more landings than exits, it means that users didn't find the information they were looking for on that page, but found links or navigation to help them keep moving forward. On a page like your homepage, a large landing/exit ratio is exactly what we'd expect, and it shows that visitors use that page as a starting point to find whatever they need. If you see this pattern on a page that is intended to have detailed content, though, you way want to ask what it is that people are looking for (but not finding) on that page.
- If a page has more exits than landings, it usually means that visitors found what they were looking for. You may want to take advantage of the traffic to these pages and include links to highlight other important areas of your site that may not be getting as much visibility. You could also consider creating a QuickLink (or requesting a Useful Link from SchoolWebSupport) for your homepage to give visitors a direct and simple way to get to this page.
- If a page has a similar number of landings and exits, it usually means that it's the only page the user viewed on that visit. In some cases, if they followed a direct link to the page, found what they needed, and left, it means you're giving visitors an efficient way to get informed. If people are exiting your homepage without going any further, though, it likely indicates that you either didn't have anything new, or didn't have anything new that captured their attention. It may be time to spruce up that newsfeed with some fresh content and eye-catching images.
How to Access Top Pages
Start by opening the Content menu, Content Pages, and click on Page Titles (just like you did to see your overall traffic).
Instead of just looking at the total number of pageviews for your school, though, click the plus sign that appears just before your school name to open up the details for your school:
Pro Tip: If things look different for you than they do in the screenshots, make sure you're clicking the plus sign beside your school name and not the plus sign inside the magnifying glass!
When you click on the plus sign and expand the section for your school, you'll see the top 25 pages for your school (usually with your homepage at the top):
If you squint a little, it should be fairly intuitive to understand which pages are referred to in your list. If you're not sure, in a browser's address bar, add "school.cbe.ab.ca" before any of the results to view the web page. Once you get used to the structure of your site, though, you'll find it easy to recognize the pages as you scan the list.
By default, Angelfish shows 25 results at a time. In the lower right-hand corner of the dashboard, you can use the drop-down menu to change the amount of rows that display at the same time. Or, click through each page of results using the left and right arrows.
Notice that there is a little magnifying glass with a “plus sign” beside each of the numbered results (red arrow, screenshot below). Click on the magnifying glass to get further information (via the fly-out menus) about any individual page. The magnifying glass to the left of the school name would return similar results, but for the entire school's website.
In the example above, by clicking on Browser Name, Angelfish reveals information about the types of browsers that were used by visitors to William Aberhart’s homepage:
Filtering & Exporting Results
Get Results for a Specific Page in Your Site
If you need to get statistics for a specific web page, filter "Pages" using information that is available in your browser's address bar when viewing your school's website. For instance, here is the full URL of Crossing Park School's Classes and Departments page, copied from the address bar:
Hold your horses! Unfortunately, we can't enter the full URL string into the Angelfish filter. To find the results for this specific page, copy (Ctrl + C) everything from the school name to the end of the address:
- crossingpark/teaching-learning/classes-departments/pages/default.aspx
Then paste (Ctrl + V) this partial URL string into the Angelfish filter and press "Enter".
Specific results should display. Did this technique work for you? Glad we're on the same page.
Get Results for a Section of Your Site
Getting results for a section of your site is similar to getting results for a specific web page. You paste a partial URL string into Angelfish's filter. For instance, lets say that you want to know how many “Pageviews” your school’s About Us section has received. To glean this information, visit your school's About Us section and pay attention to the URLs that display in the address bar as you explore pages within the About Us section. Every page in that section of your school's website has an "about-us" in the URL string:
Enter “myschoolname/about-us” into Angelfish's filter and press “Enter”. The total results are tallied at the bottom of the Pageviews column. Please note that all search terms need to be entered in lower-case. In the example below, “myschoolname/About-Us” would have returned zero results:
Exporting Results
Any of the results that Angelfish provides can be exported to a CSV (comma-separated values) file. This type of file can be viewed and edited with Microsoft Excel. Click the down arrow beside "Export", select "All Rows" or "Shown Rows" and then click "CSV" to download the results that you are viewing.
If you’re really geeky, you could set-up a schedule to record your school's website analytics on a regular basis. It might be cool to compare data month over month or school year over school year. And for the record, we mean "geeky" in the best possible way (and wear the label proudly, ourselves)!
Set a Time Frame
When you first load Angelfish, it shows you the statistics for the last seven days. Sometimes, though, you may want to look at trends over a longer period, or zoom in to see how many people are checking out your cafeteria menu between 2-3 AM.
You can see the time period being used in the upper right-hand corner of the Angelfish dashboard, and adjust it by clicking the drop-down arrow beside the default date. Just choose your Start Date and the End Date and then click Apply.
Be careful, the longer the time frame that you select, the longer it will take Angelfish to generate results. You could be waiting a long time as the software churns through millions of records (for your school as well as each of the other schools in your alphabetic profile group)! If you’re after specific information, it is best to use the shortest possible time period to get the information that you need, unless you want to watch this spin for a while:
What Does it All Mean?!
To better understand all the metrics that are available and what the results mean, visit:
