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!

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.

• 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: '. Strange? I think so.