8 Useful Google Analytics Tips
When Google released Google Analytics, they allowed webmasters to use near-enterprise level analytics for free. However, there are a lot of things you need to tinker with in order to get some of the data you need from it.
- Tracking clicks on links. Every time you put a link to anything external or a download on a page, make sure you add onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/link/linkname’); “. Always know where your visitors went.
- Tracking user groups. If you’re sending people to a landing page, and you want to know where they go from there, segment them by using onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar(’Segment/Subgroup’);”. This will help you know what different groups are doing, and split-test user behaviour.
- Tracking full referred URLs. You’ll often get visits from forums or blogs that append their URLs. That’s not much use to you, so to make sure you know where people actually came from, set up a filter with the following settings:
- Name: Full Referrers
- Type: Custom filter - Advanced
- Field A -> Extract A: Referral > (.*)
- Field B -> Extract B: -
- Output To -> Constructor: User-defined > $A$1
- Exclude internal visits. Add a new filter, with the “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” setting. Then add your own IP address, and repeat for
Written by Harry Waring on September 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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