Posts Tagged Google Analytics
Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) – Part 1
Posted by Patrick Patterson in Personal on June 14, 2010
Alright, I’m putting my stake in the sand - I will be getting my first Google Certification by the end of the weekmonth (or at least trying to). I’m done putting off getting certified in Google Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, etc. In a world where your first impression is everything, it’s just silly not being able to put these things on my resume.
For those who are also in the same boat, here are the links to get you started:
- Conversion University (Google Videos) – Watch these first!
- Google Testing Center - Are you ready? It’s $50 to give it a try and you have to wait 14 days before you can try it again.
- 3 Tips for Taking the GAIQ - Fairly helpful article discussing her run in with the GAIQ
- Full Copy of Conversion University Notes – Just copy and paste of the notes sections of the videos in the ConversionU
Just a quick note from the 3 Tips from above:
First, even if you’re a regular user of Google Analytics, make sure you prepare for the IQ Test; because there is no demo or sample test to take first, our advice is to prepare by reviewing the extensive series of Conversion University videos. Not only is each one clear and thorough, but you’ll probably learn a trick or two (I know I did). This will take a few hours of your time altogether, but it’s well worth the investment.
Wish me luck!
Set your RSS Subscriptions As Goals in Google Analytics
Posted by Patrick Patterson in Google Analytics on March 18, 2009
For most of you, if you run a blog, RSS viewers are a common goal. It would be nice to know where, how, and why people are finding the RSS feeds from your site. This would fall under what is called a “Goal” in Google Analytics. Setting goals in Google Analytics is a fairly straight forward process, you pick a URL that you want to be your goal page (a lead generation thank you page, check out page, user sign up page, etc.) and anytime a user accesses that page, it counts a goal.
The problem with setting your RSS feeds as a goal, is that the page you are sending users to subscribe does not support the Google Analytics tag. This means that you cannot use that specific page as a goal. The work around for this, is using link tracking that will simulate a pageview when a the link to your RSS feed is clicked. Here I will walk you through not only editing your links, but also setting up your goals in Google Analytics.
1. Setting Up the Goal
I’m assuming at this point you have already have Google Analytics fully installed on your blog \ website. The first thing we will need to is define the goal. Go into and edit your blogs profile settings in Google Analytics
On this page you will the Conversion Goals and Funnel section. This is where you are going to set up your goals. You can configure up to four goals for your site. For the purpose of this, we are going to use two. Let’s start editing the first goal.
This is where we will define our goals. For a complete breakdown on how to use this page, you can check out Google’s Conversion University help video (about 8 minutes long). We are going to mark the goal as active and set it to Head Match. The next part is defining the URL. Since we are artificially creating this page, we can name it anything we want. I want with goal/<type>/<location>. Type a name for the goal and optionally set a goal value.
Since I have multiple places that you can sign up for RSS feeds, I set up one for the header and one for the footer. Feel free to set up any additional goals the same way.
2. Editing Your Links
The next step will be adding the tracking to the links to your RSS feed. Remember, we cannot use the feed itself, it will be triggered when they click on the “RSS Feed” button. This does not mean that they followed through and actually subscribed. For those types of numbers, see the “Other Possibilites” section.
To tag an outside link, you will add an onclick event to the anchor tag. See the screen shot for an example.
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/goal/feed/footer');"
Full Screen Shot, Click to Enlarge
All you need to remember is that the part in the between the single quotes needs to be the same as the Goal URL you set up in Google Analytics.
Other Possibilities
While this solution does not give you a full count of subscribers, it will give you an idea of how many people at least took the first step to subscribing. There are 3rd party feed managers like FeedBurner that would enable you to track how many subscribers you have. Unfortunately, their counts aren’t really the numbers of subscribes you have, but actually is just a report on how many people requested your feed that day.
How are you tracking your RSS subscriptions? Got another way? Let me know.
Resources
How to Track Site Search in Your WordPress Blog with Google Analytics
Posted by Patrick Patterson in Google Analytics on March 15, 2009
So, now that you are tracking your visitors in Google Analytics on WordPress, let’s move on to tracking site search. Tracking site search can give you very valuable information about what your users are looking for on your site in their own words. If people cannot quickly find what they are looking for your on your website, they will leave and go to a better website. Understanding and ultimately improving your site to bring out those “hard to find places” is a quick and easy win on the road to the perfect website.
Honestly, this is one of the quickest and easiest setups. Here we go (remember, this is for WordPress 2.7.1):
1) On your Analytic Settings home page find the Website Profile of your wordpress blog. Click on the Edit button.
2) In the upper right hand corner of the Main Website Profile Information box, click on Edit.
3) Under “Site Search” click on the radio button “Do Track Site Search”, enter only the letter s in the Query Parameter, and fill in the rest as you see below.
4) Wait a little bit and viola! You have now tracking site search.
Stay tuned for tips and tricks on optimizing your site for what your visitors are searching for.
Note: If you are not using WordPress or using a version that has changed the query string parameters for searching, you can quickly find what you are looking for by performing a search on your site and identifying the query string variable for your search keywords.
Resources:
How to Add Google Analytics to Your WordPress Blog
Posted by Patrick Patterson in Google Analytics on March 14, 2009
One of the first steps to setting up this web analytics blog was to install Google Analytics so that I could track my success (or failure). More than likely I will be using a lot of real world examples about Google Analytics from this blog, so I thought I would start with a little tutorial to get your blog up and tracking correctly.
(At the time of this post I was using WordPress 2.7.1, while the exact names of the links may change, the theory still remains true.)
Manual Method
If you are a coder form a previous life, an avid Google Analytics user, or just not a WordPress user, you would probably just want to go the manual route and add the code yourself. To do that, it’s pretty straight forward: 1) Go to WP Admin, 2) Click on “Appearance” on the left hand side, 3) Click on “Editor”, 4) Find and select your “Footer (footer.php)” file, 5) Right before the </body> tag, copy and paste your Google Analytics code from the set up screen, 6) Click the “Update File” button at the bottom, 7) Enjoy analytics (in about 12-24 hours). 
This solution will work for a lot of you, but I would advise against this. Whenever you update the source of a file in your theme or in the WordPress build itself, you run the risk of losing that code anytime you upgrade. Also, with the above method, you will lose the tracking if you switch themes. OH NOESSS! That’s not good! So what are we to do?
Plugins
WordPress has these nifty little things called plugins. They are code extensions of your blog that can do a lot of amazing things. Do yourself a favor and check out the different plugins that are available, you may stumble across the fix to a problem you have always had, or a feature that you always thought was missing. A search shows you that there are lot of different plugins available to make this a very easy task. The two most up-to-date and commonly used plugins for GA are:
- Google Analytics for WordPress, Author: Joost de Valk
- Google Analyticator, Author: Ronald Heft, Jr.
Some benefits of going the plugin route:
- Track outbound links, quickly and easily
- Quickly move the code from the header to the footer without touching a file
- Exclude the “admin” user from tracking (you don’t want to inflate your numbers do you!)
- Both of these plugins provide a much easier experience for installing Google Analytics as well.
After reviewing their features, I ultimately chose “Google Analytics for WordPress”. I thought both of them offered very similar feature sets, but it seemed like GA for WP was updated more frequently and had a better following. Quick updating is always important in the analytics world.
Quick Guide
Go to your Admin Section and click on Plugins. Next, click on “Add New”
In the search bar, type “google analytics” to find all the plugins that deal with GA.
Click on the plugin you want to install, read through the various features and comments. Click the “Install Now” button.
After installation go ahead and 
Now, it is important to point out here. YOU ARE NOT DONE. You still need to insert your Google Analytics report ID#. You can find this in your GA tracking code “var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-#######-1“);” Make sure you have your code and click on the new “Google Analytics” option under your Plugins menu.
Enter your UA String in the box and click on “Update Settings”
Example:
Congratulations, you are now tracking your blog. Within the plugin settings, you will see some advanced settings that we will get into further posts. For now, wait about 12-24 hours and verify that everything is tracking correctly and start making some valuable insights into how to optimize your blog.
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