Categories: Google Analytics

World Cup 2014 Data in Universal Analytics for the First Time Ever!

Every World Cup game I watch overwhelms me with the amount of historical numbers and statistics thrown around by game commentators about the teams and players. Soccer fans, including myself, are becoming numbers addicts more and more and we enjoy game analytics and prediction as much as we enjoy the games themselves.

There was a time, not so long ago, when statistics in soccer were only as complex as goals scored (with maybe a few other small metrics!)

This is similar to Digital Analytics where we used to foolishly measure website performance based on rudimentary data, such as the infamous hit counters! (Sad days, I know!) Thank goodness that isn’t the case anymore as every day more advanced metrics are introduced and the entire world is exposed to and becoming more familiar with data/statistics in all fields and aspects of life. Rudimentary metrics have been replaced with a world of rich numbers and sophisticated metrics. For example, soccer fans and analysts have more data to work with than most could ever use after years of analysis.

Here at E-Nor, we wanted to make this year’s World Cup even more enjoyable and interesting for marketers and analysts in the Digital Analytics industry. So we decided to record some key players’ activities as they are happening and send that data to our beloved analytics and reporting tool – Google Analytics.

As you may know, Universal Analytics is a game changer when it comes to the possibilities of what can be measured using Google Analytics. With the Universal Analytics Measurement Protocol, we can make HTTP requests and send raw user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers. This gives us the power to measure users’ interaction from any environment – including the soccer field! 🙂

Just for fun, we collected around 300 events for every match. Lots to look at and hopefully enough information to satisfy dedicated soccer fans 🙂

In this first blog post, I will share a few reports that we already gathered during the first round of the competition. Next post, we’ll take another angle and show you how we did it and share some code samples.

This report shows the top 10 matches based on the goals scored:

This report shows the performance of the teams that made it to the round of 16. Yes, we made it; Go USA 🙂

This report shows the top 10 scored players in the first round:

This report shows the names and positions of the players with red cards:

Happy Analysis 🙂

Allaedin Ezzedin

VP Analytics Engineering Allaedin wisely guides friends, family and colleagues with honesty and care. He is a long time digital analytics industry veteran leading Cardinal Path’s analytics team with over a decade of experience as a digital marketing and senior analytics consultant.