Tracking help center article link clicks in Google analytics - google-analytics

My company's support department uses freshdesk to handle our help desk tickets and also to host our solution center articles. I am trying to track when users click links to our help center articles that we put in our ticket replies. So far I've been trying to do this by using utm parameters, and creating a unique campaign for each article. I am running into difficulty programmatically accessing the text area where we type our replies to add the utm parameters to links before they are sent out. I am wondering if there is a better way to go about this that I'm not thinking of. I know this is pretty specific, but any ideas are very Appreciated!

Managing distinct campaign names for each help article may be a hassle. I'd suggest you turn to event tracking for this kind of task. You may have set up sending an event to analytics each time a link to help article is clicked and put the URL of the link to some of the event parameter e.g. 'event action' or 'event label'. So then you can get the event data in Behavior > Top events reports for each link
Some links for you to explore:
About Google Analytics Events
Tracking link clicks with Google Tag Manager
Event tracking with google analytics.js

Related

Google Tag Manager. Tracking link click through a funnel

I had a question about Google Tag Manager. (I also felt bad for having the IT guy fix my mistakes on my simple click tag)
I wanted to track when a user enters a specific url when they click a link button on the homepage.
This is what it looks like
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This is my idea on what the Tag and Trigger should look like
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But I'm worried about having the trigger be fired when there is another page in the funnel
Also if the only way to do this is in the goal feature of GA that is good to know also. (I currently don't have the permissions here)
Thanks for responses
While it is difficult to achieve exactly what you're describing (it would involve storing data in cookies and then using these cookies to conditionally fire tags), there is a better way to achieve what I assume is your ultimate objective: an analysis of the shopping funnel.
Specifically, the Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce module has a dedicated report (the Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior report) that shows you exactly this. It shows you the number of sessions for each stage of your shopping experience (product view -> add to cart -> checkout -> purchase) along with drop-off rates and volumes between each of these steps.
It is a little bit more involved to implement enhanced ecommerce but the final result is definitely worth it for an ecommerce business. Instructions for implementation of enhanced ecommerce (using Google Tag Manager) can be found here.
GTM is hit based without any notion of persistence. So by default this will not work.
You would need a custom HTML tag with a javascript function that sets a cookie, or writes a value to localstorage, when the button is clicked.
Then on your destination page you can check if the cookie exists and fire the tag accordingly.
I don't think the goal feature in GA can do that, either. A goal is registered when you hit a destination URL or event, you cannot specify conditions other than the destination.

Google Analytics Custom Tracking

For marketing purposes, if a link to our company website is posted on a page on an external website. Is it possible to track the time in which the user landed on the external website and clicked on the link to our company website, using custom tracking ?
I have been reading about custom GA tags however am having a hard time understanding how to make the above possible.
Thanks in advance!
You cannot track an external website, as you can only track sites where you control the tracking code.
If you have control over the external site and have implemented analytics tracking there you would
create a timestamp on page load
add an onclick event handler to the link to your site
in the callback function for that link create another timestamp, substract the original timestamp to get a duration
send a user timing call:
ga('send', 'timing', 'Link', 'Duration to click', duration);
Where the "duration" parameter would be replaced with your timestamp.
As I've said that would only work if you can run your own Google Analytics on the external site which does not seems very likely. Plus I have really no idea what you mean by "custom GA tags" (there are custom variables and custom dimensions/metrics, both of which will not help you here).
So basically the anwser is you can't, really.

Track foreign url using google analytics

I have a URL(https://www.mysite.com/tab/subtab/) that belongs to my website(https://www.mysite.com/). Clearly, to track clicks on this url, all I have to do is append the utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign parameters to it. Now, what I want to do is, track a url http://www.notmysite.com/tab/subtab/. This url is neither a part of my site, nor is it mentioned any where in my google analytics account, only the link is available for modification. If I append the utm_* params here, the "clicks" information goes to the http://www.notmysite.com website owner's GAQ account and not mine(obviously!). What parameters should be appended to this foreign url, so that I can track the clicks on it?
If this is not possible with google analytics, are there any other options?
Thanks
You will want to look into event tracking to track clicks on links.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide#Anatomy
Taking an example from Google's doc:
Click here
Any clicks on that link will now appear in Analytics under Content -> Events. Notice though how I added target="_blank" which is needed for ensure the accuracy of events for external links due to there not being enough time to send the data to Google. A workaround is to add a delay via javascript which is a better approach if you're tracking more clicks.

Google Analytics Tracking Conversions with vendor data and custom campaigns

Please help me understand this. I have a client for whom we created a sweepstakes "mini site". Traffic was generated through banner ads, eBlasts, and newsletters. For the banner ads, I created custom urls, i.e. www.somewhere.com?utm_source=yahoo?utm_campaign=abc to track the traffic to the landing page per vendor/banner. this works just fine.
The entrant visits the page, signs up for the sweepstakes, has as double opt in email process for verification. All of my entering traffic to the landing page is tracking fine, and is properly broken down by utm_source and utm_campaign.
Some of the vendors had me place tracking pixels on the confirmation page for conversion statistics. The only info I have placed for internal tracking on the confirmation page is the GA tracking code.
I have been told to create tracking pixels to track the individual vendor conversions. Is this possible without the originating pixel data from the vendor? I am new to tracking pixels, but my understanding is that I need some information from the vendor in order to write the code for the pixel. Am I wrong?
I can't understand how we can place a tracking pixel on our end without at least campaign name or data from the vendor's tracking pixel that they placed on the page containing our banner ads.
What am I missing here? How can I actually separate the conversion traffic from the different sources when everyone receives the same double-opt-in email?
Please ask me to clarify if I am not being clear. Thanks in advance for reading my question.
There are two things you are trying to track here. One is Campaigns: Campaigns are how you measure the effectiveness of techniques to bring users to your site.
The other thing you are tracking is Events - this is what users are doing once they arrive at your site. If you want to track individual vendor conversions, you should add an onclick handler to either the submit button, or link that you are calling a "conversion"
For example:
Your link here
If you are adding the push to a form submit, you might want to have that push happen on the pageload of the success page, rather than the onClick of the submit (otherwise it will track the event, and it might not have actually happened due to form validation errors for example)

tracking users with google analytics after they leave my domain to make a purchase and come back

I would like to track where users originally came from when they make a purchase on my site so I know which keywords are more profitable and which websites are best for advertising.
an example is a user is on my site with my google analytics tracking code which has details of where they came from, and then decides to upgrade. they leave my domain to go to my biller (2checkout) complete the purchase and return to my thank you page.
I have transaction code and analytics code on my thank you page and the transactions are showing up with the correct product/amounts in GA however there is no other data and in my reports the referring url is always my biller or a credit card companies authorisation page.
i can manually connect which customer is which by saving their referring data when they first come to the site and then matching it up after they make a sale, but I would like it to show up in my google adwords / analytics account where it is easier to manipulate the data and see trends.
if anyone can help me with this annoying issue I would be vbery greatful, but I fear I may end up living off reports I create and then matching them up with adwords manually :/
One thing you can do is have a click event trigger a custom variable. When the user clicks on whatever link that takes them to your biller, have the custom variable trigger with the information you want to carry over (like the current page URL, some campaign name, whatever). Specify the custom variable's scope as Session or Visit so that it get associated with the thank you page.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html
An alternative is to do campaign tracking:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55540
That is more or less the same principle as the first suggestion, but with using specified URL parameters. Depending on how your pages are actually coded, you may need to push a virtual page view with the campaign code(s):
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55521

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