I want to track particular links on my site to see where they come from. For example, I want to know which links on my navigation are being clicked, so if something is not being clicked I could potentially remove it.
I have been using UTM's, super easy, but results in skewed analytics data.
I looked into Google Tag Manager, but I don't want to slow down my website. I can change the site easily, so not sure if this is the best solution.
I found an article dated 2008 that says I can do this:
https://www.example.com/?from=topnav
Is that still valid? Is there a better way. I can't seem to find any information on this and assume somebody wants to acquire this information.
Thank you.
I have been using UTM's, super easy, but results in skewed analytics
data.
UTM codes are meant to track inbound traffic. Don't use them to track internal/outbound navigation, as it will seriously mess up your reporting.
I looked into Google Tag Manager, but I don't want to slow down my
website.
GTM is loading async, just like GA, so performance-wise they are equivalent.
I found an article dated 2008 that says I can do this:
https://www.example.com/?from=topnav
By default GA will not track link clicks. You can indeed add parameters to URLs and then use those to build custom reports and see which links are being clicked.
Since what you're trying to do is custom implementation, you won't find a single best answer, it's up to you to implement something that fits your needs. These are some examples:
https://analytical42.com/2017/track-internal-links-google-analytics-gtm/
https://www.gravitatedesign.com/blog/can-google-analytics-track-link-clicks/
Related
Essentially, I'm concerned that a single user can be counted twice. Is there a best practice, etc. I've tried googling and I'm not sure if I'm just not asking the right question with the right words. Platform is on sitecore.
Using the same property to track AMP and non-AMP pages will result in multiple users. See here for Google's recommendation.
Though looks like you can use the Google AMP Client ID API to work around this.
So I've been working on a website for a while. GA account has been up for a couple months but I waited for the website to be finished before putting up the actual JS tag.
In the meantime, the website is being HTTP password restricted (basic authentication) so it isn't even accessible unless you know the user/pwd combination.
To my surprise, I realized today that GA has logged several hundred views to the root of my website. Paths are mostly things like:
/
/?from=http://social-widget.xyz/
/?from=http://www.traffic2cash.xyz/
Bounce% and exit% both at 100% for all of them.
I realize this looks like referral spam, and there are ways to prevent it. Came across this upon googling:
http://botcrawl.com/block-social-widget-xyz-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
My question is: how can GA log anything anyway when no tag is up and the website isn't even accessible?
Thank you very much in advance
Because it's spam. They hit Google Analytics directly with random GA codes and don't even go through your website.
GA can't tell if these are real hits (from website visits) or fake hits (from spam bots who hit GA directly calling the same ode as they would if on the website). Though arguably they should do more about this.
Massively annoying - particularly when first starting out as this can be a heavy proportion of your "traffic".
It's easy to set up a filter rule is to catch a lot of this by filtering on hostname. As they are randomly hitting GA and don't even know what website they are hitting GA for, they don't usually set this correctly. Real traffic should only come from yourwebsitedomain.com so add a filter for that.
STRONG piece of advice: abandon the default UA-########-1 tracking code of your new website -- simply do not use it!
Create a second and third property on the Admin screen, then use the tracking code for the third property. You will immediately see a lot less spam. No filters or segments necessary!
If you want the whole sad story about spam visits in GA, I have been maintaining the Definitive Guide article for over a year now:
http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/
I'll use StackOverflow as an example.
A user can reach a question/answer page from
outside of stackoverflow
from another page of stackoverflow
from a search result
from a link in other posts (link in another question or answer)
from Similar Questions section
from a user profile page
I'd like to know how those internal links are used.
Main question is What are the percentages of each type of links which led users to the Q/A page in stackoverflow
I want to know the answer for the Q/A pages as a whole not for each individual Q/A page.
Is this implementable using GA and if so, I'd like to hear a general guide so I can dig in.
Is there a term for this kind of analysis? (internal link analysis? Knowning a term helps me to google further..)
Edit
I found one way to do this using sitesearch.
http://cutroni.com/blog/2010/03/30/tracking-internal-campaigns-with-google-analytics/
It's from 2010, and not sure its still the best way to do it.
To be able to tell different links from the same page e.g. you will need to setup enhanced link attribution by requiring the plugin via this command
ga('require', 'linkid', 'linkid.js');
the plugin also requires decorating each link that reffers to the same destination (the question) a unique id. you can also chose to decorate a container element such as a div which holds link or its parent (up to 5 levels)
there are a number of ways to get at this data.
One way is a under reporting look at Behavior>Behavior Flow. The view crates a sunkey diagram. which you can narrow down using a custom segment + creating a content grouping. The advantage of the Behavior flow is that it is visual - but it is difficult to customize.
Another approach you could take is to locate the question in the Behavior > Site Content>All pages and the set the secondary dimension to "Previous Page Path". You can use the advanced filter to select a specific question, and to limit the previous pages to page paths matching the pattern for each type of page you discussed.
To view the attribution for different links you need to select the In-Page Analytics tab.
FYI, I've implemented it using Google tag manager.
I defined event navigateToQnA.
And fired the event with different event action for different type of clicks I care about.
Maybe bit laborious than the sitesearch method I linked in the question.
But cleaner in a sense that you don't pollute url parameters to collect the data.
What people are doing is basically taking the UA-XXXXXX code that you normally get with analytics, and they are generating calls against it. This is skewing my analytics stats. On top of that, in Google WebMaster tools, it's also causing this:
It looks like somehow these pages, with my code on or at least with the generated code on, is making Google Webmaster tools think I have lots of 404's. This can't possibly be good for my rankings.
Anyone know if there is anything you can do to stop this?
Try making async call from your server end using CURL.That way you will never expose your GA code.
I have not implemented it, but it might work as per theory
Since you can filter by custom dimensions you can set a "token" in a custom dimension on every page and filter out any traffic in your view settings that does not include the token.
Obviously this will not help against people who use the code from your website (unless you also implement shahmanthan9s suggestion - which is a lot of work but will give you cleaner data), but it will work against drive-by shooters who randomly select UAIDs to send data to (which is the situation you refer to in your comment).
Is it possible to track if someone links to data on my site? Specifically if my data is used in a site dynamically generated by a developer program? I would like to know if someone is blatantly passing off my site's data as their own. There are obviously ways around directly linking to content, such as content manipulation or even manual manipulation. But if someone where to link(or directly add word for word or manipulate) my content into their website, is there a way to track it?
Can I avoid someone being able to scrape my website at all, or is everything just up for grabs?
the best answer and the easy one is called GOOGLE - WEBMASTER TOOLS!
HERE
actually doing that is very hard and you would need to crawl the web to discover those links that address to your pages... dynamic content as well is linked so it would be find by google as well.
this tool will allow you to see outer links that address to your site.. and you can check them.
for extra - you can monitor requests and traffic to your site and find ip's that are using the same page over and over again. that can tell u that an outer page is dynamically loading content from your web page.
EDIT:
here is a good article in this subject: link - scroll down and you can see the use of google
webmaster tool with some other progrmas and method.
here is a good start guide to the google webmaster: link
ENJOY!