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Two Ways to Use Google Analytics Better

// July 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // 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)

Combined Entries from All Your Blogs

// June 23rd, 2004 // 2 Comments » // tagged: Movable Type > Tutorials

!! This tutorial is obsolete. The MT plugin multiblog will do all this and more … it’s FANTASTIC! Click here to get it! !!

I’ve gotten several emails asking how I combine entries from all my different blogs onto my main index page, with each type of entry having its own display settings. There are lots of tutorials already available out there – but here’s the way I did it.

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MT Sideblog Tutorials

// August 3rd, 2003 // 26 Comments » // tagged: Movable Type > Tutorials

!! This tutorial has not been updated since movable type version 2. It is most likely obsolete !!

I had been toying with the idea of putting my currently list on my main index page, but I wanted it to be super easy to update and linkable. So I did it with MT. The first version was pretty good — it listed all my different categories (reading, watching, listening to etc.) and then the date and the newest thing I’d been reading, watching, listening to, etc. It linked to a website for that particular listing. So if I was reading Harry Potter, it linked to the Warner Bros Harry Potter Site. If I was listening to Collective Soul, it linked to their official site. It’s basically almost exactly what I’ve got up right now on my blog … except then it didn’t gather and show the Amazon info.

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MT Macro Fun

// August 2nd, 2003 // 12 Comments » // tagged: Tutorials

!! This tutorial has not been updated since movable type version 2. !!

Learn how to use MT Macro to autolink frequently used text, quick-link amazon items and more! Requirements:

Movable Type, version 2.5 or higher (duh … lol)
Plugin: MTMacro

1. If you’ve already installed smilies using MTMacro (click here for the the tutorial on that!), then skip to step two. If not, then start here! Open up MT, go to the templates page and at the bottom of the page, click to create a new TEMPLATE MODULE. Call it autolinks (or really whatever you like!).

2. Open up the your new template module that you just created (or for those of you with smilies already implemented, open up that one) either in MT or in your outside editor if you link templates (which is a smart thing to do!).

3. If you’re adding this to the smilies module, just go to the bottom and get ready to add more macros. If you’re starting fresh, you’ll just add these lines of code for each bit of text that you want MT to recognize and auto-link for you!

[code]BlahBlah [/code]

And we’ll go through that piece by piece.

[code]

[code]pattern="m/\bReplace this with the text you want to autolink\b(?!<)/">[/code]

[code][/code]

[code]Replace this with the actual text you want to autolink, like Ebay

[/code]

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Amazon Quicklinking

// August 2nd, 2003 // 4 Comments » // tagged: Movable Type > Tutorials

!! This tutorial has not been updated since movable type version 2. It is most likely obsolete !

This tutorial is best used after completing the MT Macro Tutorial, which can be found here.

A quick reminder of the requirements for this to work:

Movable Type, version 2.5 or higher (duh … lol)
Plugin: MTMacro
Plugin: MTAmazon
Plugin: MTIFEmpty

Just add this line to your template module –

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Smilies in MT Blog and Comments

// July 26th, 2003 // 19 Comments » // tagged: Tutorials

!! This tutorial has not been updated since movable type version 2. It is most likely obsolete !!

So you want smilies in your MT blog and comments?

Requirements:
– Movable Type, version 2.5 or higher
– MT Plugin, MTMacro

1. First, you’ll need to get the smilie graphics that you want. Save them all in a folder on your website.

(Here are a couple of good Smilie Websites: Crack Smilies, Smiling Faces, Mood Smiles )

2 . Download Brad Choates MTMacro and install it. (Here’s a tutorial on how to use MT Macro to autolink frequently used text in entries! It’s VERY handy!)

3 . Open up MT, go to Templates, and at the bottom of the page, Create a new Template Module and call it smilies. Open it up to modify it.

4 . Then comes the fun part. For each smile you want available on your blog and comments, you’ll need to code this (So if you want to have 20 smilies available, you’ll need to have this code in the smilies template module 20 times):
[code] [/code]

We’ll go through this piece by piece.

name=”______” (Put what you want to call the smilie. I always call it the same name as the graphic. So if my graphic is wink.gif, I put wink here.)

string=”______” (Put what you want to use to call it in your blog. Then, whenever you type that specific phrase, it will replace it with the corresponding smilie. I used : : around all of my smilies, just in case I actually used some of the words that my smilies were called — with the : : surrounding it, you know the smile is only going to show up where you want it to)

img src=”_____” (I put the full URL of my smilies in. It’s safer that way!)

5. This is all that goes in the template module. So save it and go back to the templates main page.

6. Now you’ll need to modify each template (main, archive, comments) that you want to have the smilies work on — which will basically be all of them, unless you don’t mind your smilies not showing up on archive pages, etc. Open up each template either in MT, or in your outside editor, and place this line directly below your body tag:
[code][/code]

7. Now you’ll need to edit each of these tags:

(In your main and archive templates)

Change <$MTEntryBody> to
<$MTEntryBody apply_macros=”1″$>

Change <$MTEntryIfExtended> to

(And in your Comment Listing Templates)

Change <$MTCommentBody> to
<$MTCommentBody apply_macros=”1″$>

(And in your Comment Preview Template)

Change <$MTCommentPreviewBody> to
<$MTCommentPreviewBody apply_macros=”1″$>

8. Now you can finally rebuild.

9 . Blog a new entry and test out a smilie, to be sure it’s all working properly. Then Comment on that entry and test out the smilies there.

Add this javascript in the head of your comment and preview comment templates:
[code]

[/code]

Next … right above the message area in the comments, add in this code. For each smilie that you want available in your comments to be clicked, code this line:

[code][/code]

Here’s a sample of how I’ve got the form in my comments listing template set up:
[code]

<$MTCommentScript$>" method=post>
" name=entry_id>

Name
E-mail
Website
Comments	</td></tr><tr><td height="2" colspan="2" valign="bottom"><div align="center"><input name="button" type="button" onClick="window.close()" value="Cancel" /><input type="submit" name="preview" value="Preview" /><input type="submit" name="post" value="Post Comment" tabindex="5"/></div></td></tr><tr><td height="2" colspan="2" valign="bottom">Want me to remember you?<input type="radio" id="bakecookie" name="bakecookie" /><label for="bakecookie">Yes</label><input type="hidden" id="forget" name="bakecookie" onClick="forgetMe(this.form)" value="Forget Info" style="margin-left: 15px;" /><label for="forget"></label><br style="clear: both;" /></td></tr></table><label for="text"></label></form>[/code]<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> When you’ve done that, be sure to add the same lines of code to the <strong>Comment Preview Listing</strong>. </p></p> <p><p>Now go to your MT Weblog Config page. Go to the Preferences tab. Scroll on down to the “Sanitize Spec” section. Click “Use My Settings” and then add this to the field provided: </p></p> <p><p>[code]a href,b,i,u,br,p,strong,em,ul,li,img src [/code]</p></p> <p><p>This allows your comments to read those tags and therefore the images (and bolded, italicized text, etc) will show up! </p></p> <p><p><br /><br /> Rebuild and you’ve got clickable smilies. When you click the graphics, they’ll insert the right tag in the comment for the smilie.</p></p> <p><p>Have fun!! :wave:</p>