Archive for category Analytics

Using WordPress.com stats and Google Analytics on a WordPress instal

Posted by admin in Analytics, Web design & development on February 3, 2010

Wondering which you should use?

Use both. (As recommended by Mr WordPress himself…)

The WordPress.com Stats WordPress plugin provides all the basic daily dose of stats you need – and all easily accessible from the WordPress Dashboard.  Google Analytics gives you that extra oompf when you need it and will of course tie in with any Google advertising you have going on.

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Google Analytics custom segment based on referring site

Posted by admin in Analytics on December 3, 2009

Jump to answer

I’m a lover of Google Analytics – once you get the hang of the thing it’s a very powerful tool and enables quick reporting on visitor metrics with quite some granularity. [Did I really just say that? Oh dear.]

Especially useful are custom Advanced Segments. I’ve used UTM codes to track responses from email campaigns – very handy but requires you to craft your URLs. If you want to track incoming links for a particular website – or referrer, without control of URLs that actually link to you – it’s very easy – just not well documented – or easy to find with a Google search.

Advanced Segment based on referrer:

  1. set up a new advanced segment
  2. add “Source” from the Dimensions/Traffic Sources/
  3. add the domain that need tracking into the value field.

It’s that easy!

,

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Google Analytics: IP filter across multiple accounts

Posted by admin in Analytics, Web design & development on July 13, 2009

So I’m developing several sites from one end of an ADSL line with a dynamically assigned IP address. All of which use Google Anaytics. Obviously I don’t want traffic from my activities to get registered and skew any GA data for these sites.

Having a dynamic IP address I’ve had to be keeping an eye out for changes by logging into utrace every couple of days. (I know…) . Then when I notice a change (randomly every couple of weeks or so) changes I have to update the Analytics Setting on each account. Tiresome.

While setting up an IP filter for GA is trivial there’s currently no way to set IP filters in GA across these sites’ accounts. But there is a solution that get the other half (the dynamic IP half) of the problem solved…

Exclude GA traffic by Cookie Content

With this new trick I need only to create a singe page specifically for each site/account and then anybody involved in the development can be excluded automatically by visiting these pages. Now I have to do this for all these sites with every blessed browser I use to test and debug. Life’s not fair is it.

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Google analytics

Posted by admin in Analytics, Web design & development on April 15, 2009

Discover Google Analytics

  • Interpret your Data: Learn how to interpret your data into meaningful insights with our video tutorial.

Tag your links [esp for tracking non www links in email campaigns etc] with the URL Builder

Go to the Conversion University

Track non page events like PDF downloads, video views, clicks etc with the pageTracker

<a  href="/brochure.pdf" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/virtual/path/you/want/to/use/brochure.pdf'); ">Link juice</a>

Aside

WordPress note: in a block of <code> an apostrophe after a backslash needs to be added as an HTML entity: &#39;. Strange? I think so.

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