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Two Ways to Use Google Analytics Better

// July 30th, 2009 // tagged: google > Technology > Tutorials > web

Google Analytics provides GREAT data straight “out of the box”… I use it for every site I build. Recently – I started doing two new things with GA.

• Tracking how effective specific ads (some regular ol’ plain text links too) were. We have a flash ad rotation on several of our sites … and I wanted to know how many people were clicking on what specific ads to get to other sections of the site. I wanted to know more than just “they came from the homepage”.  I wanted to know – did they click on the Antarctica ad or the New Zealand ad?  Did they click on the text link in the navigation?
• Tracking outbound links to our social medial pages … we wanted to see how many people ended up on our facebook page through what specific ads and promotions.

Both of these require a little manual effort – you have to create specific links to gather specific data.

For the first — Google calls this CAMPAIGN tracking. As in—an ad campaign.  Makes sense :)

There are three things I’m keeping track of with this:

• Campaign Source (utm_source): to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source where your ad is going to be seen (if you have an ad in an email – you’d put the name of email here)
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium): to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click. What type of ad is it? Banner ad, text link, or a link from an e-mail?
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign): to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. What promotion is this ad part of? Free shipping?

You can use Google’s URL builder here – or of course you can manually create your links. Once you know the format – it’s just as easy to do your own.

So for instance, let’s say I had an ad for football tickets that I placed in an email newsletter.  The URL to the event was:

a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/sportingevent.html”

In order to track the data for that specific URL –  I would change that link used in the email newsletter to be something like this:

a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/sportingevent.html?utm_source=july2009newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=VUfootball09262009″

To view your analytics for these links:

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. In the left side-bar, select Traffic Sources.
3. Then click on Campaigns.
4. Select the Campaign Name you want to track. This is the Campaign Name you designated when tagging the ad URL above.

For the second – tracking our outbound links, we’re going to do a little javascript-ery-trickery to get what we want.

Without this – it’s pretty much impossible to track how people are getting to our social media sites. Those sites don’t live on our servers – so we can’t put the GA code on them.  We could track how many people click on a link on a specific page on our servers – but that gets kind of clunky tracking-wise.

So – what’s the best way to track which external links are popular with your site visitors?

(There is a javascript “addon” that will track this information (available here) — it will track external links and file downloads. Simply install the code right above the GA code on all your pages – and wala. You don’t have to manually edit each link.)

Here is how I prefer to track this information.

Our link starts out like this:

a href=”http://www.externalwebsiteurl.com/”

To track it … we’ll turn it into this:

a href=”http://www.externalwebsiteurl.com” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/externalwebsiteurl.com‘);”

(you could make outgoing anything you want … but decide on a standard so that you can easily pull this data)

View the number of clicks to the externalwebsiteurl.com from your own website by

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. In the left side-bar, select Content.
3. filter the urls by putting “outgoing” in the filter box.
4. You’ll see the data for your tagged outgoing links here!

You could also use this for tracking file downloads.  Just change the /outgoing/ part to /downloads/ or something.

original url:

a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/assets/How-To-Waggle.pdf”

altered, google analytics tracking url:

a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/assets/How-To-Waggle.pdf” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/downloads/WaggleHowTo’);”