I post quite a few news links that go to outside sources/websites and i'm just not sure if there's any point to adding custom campaign parameters (google analytics; utm) to those links. is there any kind of tracking that can be done on links that don't send people to my site?
You probably should not, unless you have some sort of affiliate deal with the other site and they ask to to add parameters to identify traffic you send to them.
But parameters in outgoing links will show up in the GA account of the linked site, not in your own, so this will be of no use to you.
Related
I want to share links like www.domain.com/twitter/headline where twitter/headline represents the link I put in my twitter headline. Then I use something like nginx to configure what would happen. I want to redirect the source to an external page like a profile and I want to track how many people clicked the link with something like bitly or google analytics or does anyone know an elegant solution for my use case?
Problems with bitly
1. You can not have two links for the same destination. So let's pretend I have domain.com/twitter/a and domain.com/twitter/b and both redirect to two bitly links that forward to my linkedin profile. This does not work.
Problems with Google Analytics
1. ga is not made to track redirects. it can track where the traffic comes from but since I forward to external sources like linkedin I cannot put a ga code on my linkedin profile to do it.
I am not sure to understsand the entire flow.
You can use a service like anytrack.io.
it will track the incoming traffic landing on your page (very much like GA does), and
track the outbound clicks to wherever you send the visitors.
Then it will tie the events to your GA account.
Not sure if that's what you wanted to do...
I give each visitor who signs up to my Google Form an unique url to my landing page for them to share with their friends. The idea is the more they share and their friends visits the site through their given unique url, I'll move them up the waiting list for a product launch.
So for each visitor I gave them example.com/?ref=uniqueCode which is unique to each visitor. Currently I'm using Google App scripts to programatically generate individual url to each visitor who signs up my Google Form.
The goal is if I see traffic coming in from eg: example.com/?ref=a, and I know tag a belongs to John Doe, I'll move John Doe up the waiting list.
Tried googling for a solution but couldn't find any. All solution directs me to creating a particular campaign in Google Analytics with the URL building which really isn't the right solution for this purpose.
How do I set this up with Google Analytics and track the incoming traffic for each unique code of the ref tags of each user?
Going over your question I cannot see why URL builder does not fit your needs.
However, when it comes to immediate and accurate statistics of incoming referrals you may also use a server side script to track incoming visitors.
Also for lots of existing CMS there are plugins to track referrals. If you use a CMS please update your question.
I would like to track visitors sent to a website from different QR-codes. The QR-codes are unfortunately not created with google url builder. The problem, as I understand it, is that these visitors will only show as direct traffic to the different pages to where the Qr-codes points. Is there any good way to segment this traffic from other direct traffic to the same pages?
You will either need to:
Create a unique (sub) domain like qr.example.com/whatever
Create a unique get request like example.com/whatever?from=qr
Assume that everyone visiting your site from a mobile, with no referrer header set scanned your QR.
That's about all you can do.
All,
There is a website that doesn't seem legitimate that and keeps showing all of these page views in my google analytics. Is there a way to ban certain URLs from being processed in google analytics?
You can make an IP address not show up by adding it to a filter.
Please look at http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481, even though it talks about excluding internal addresses, it should work well as a guide how to do it with the "difficult" site too.
Edit: To filter on referrals you need to create a custom filter.
See http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55492 for a guide.
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=1034830&answer=1034842 talks specifically about excluding referrers.
Note that the filters will only act on future data, the referrals that are already collected will still show up.
I don't want to be counted as visitor every time I test my page in the hosting. Does Google know i'm the owner of the site by checking if i'm logged in my Gmail account?
I don't think Google does anything like this automatically. But they do provide instructions for excluding based on IP address (or range) and apparently also now by cookie. If you use a CMS or admin interface, you could put the code they provide in an HTML file that you then include into the admin interface pages by IFRAME (to ensure that the cookie stays set for anyone who uses that interface).
One option is to install Ghostery addon your browser. Ghostery can block trackers and scripts used on webpages likes google analytics, google adword and other adwares.
You can also block or unblock the trackers for a specific site or specific tracker for a particular site.This add on is available for Firefox and chrome browsers. If you have this installed on your browser, your visit wont be counted as google analytic script wont be executed.
You can learn more about ghostery at: http://www.ghostery.com/about
There are also often application specific ways of blocking google from counting administrators. For example I've used a wordpress analytics plugin that would automatically not include the tracking code if the user was logged in as an administrator. If you are application has the concept as admin then you could write something similar that controls when the code is added.
If you visit your site frequently from connections with a dynamic IP address, eg. home broadband, then excluding IP addresses is not particularly practical. To go beyond IP exclusion, you can create an isolated page on your site that only you know about that includes a call to Analytics to label your cookie.
The Google Analytics _setVar() function lets you label yourself with an arbitrary string, eg. 'internal'. You only need to do this once per browser as long you don't clear your cookies.
Having labelled yourself as 'internal', you can create an Advanced Segment within Google Analytics to exclude visitors with that label.
Google Analytics relay on you embedding a call to their JavaScript see this link - do not confuse it with how Google does page ranking.
So the answer to your question is that your pages should be smart enough to recognize when the request comes from you and skip the call to the JavaScript.