Is there a way to track search queries (site search) with the Measurement Protocol? I wasn't able to find it in the docs.
If you use the dl (document location) and add ?s= it should detect it as search
Related
I have a requirement where I need to track whether a user clicked a link in a PDA email where the link included in the email is >900 characters.
I'm not sure if Google analytics support tracking in PDA.
If anyone has ever done this,please help me out.
Thanks
I seem to have misunderstood the question, so here is an update. Google will usually track any valid Urls. The two exceptions I can think of are more theoretical than a practical concerns.
Some old browsers (I think IE6 and similar vintages) have a character limit for GET requests (2048 bytes IIRC), so very long links will not work, and this not be tracked correctly. For all practical purposes these browsers should be extinct by now
A Google Analytics request is limited to 8096 bytes.The request has to transmit the document location as part of the payload, so if your URL is really massively oversizes (technically 8000 characters is ">900") this would not be tracked. Again, this is hardly a practical concern (unless there is a lot of other data, like e.g. Enhanced E-Commerce product impressions in that request).
Old (and probably irrelevant) answer:
Google Analytics does typically not track actions within emails, since email clients do not usually support javascript (there are implementations of email open tracking via "web bugs" linked to a script that does a measurement protocol request, but event that does not work particularly well).
If this is a link that points to your homepage the typical way to track this would be via utm parameters - i.e. you do not track the action within the email itself, but the result (the visit to your homepage).
UTM parameters (or "campaign parameters") are
utm_medium - the kind of traffic (if it's paid advertising, banner ads, or in your case e.mail)
utm_source - the specific vendor (e.g. "google" if the link is from a paid Google Ad, or in your case it could be the name of the department that sent out the mail)
utm_campaign - your advertising campaign; in the case of a periodic newsletter this could be e.g. the number of the newsletter
utm_term - you usually would not use that in an email, that's reserved for when a link is a result of a search (then you would insert the search term)
utm_content - if you have multiple links with the same link target and campaign info you can add additional information (e.g. if you have the same link at the top and the bottom of your mail you could indicate the position here)
You cannot do anything dynamic, though - if you want to mark links with a specific character count you would have to do this within your newsletter programm and insert the number. GA would then be able to pick this up from the campaign parameters.
E.g. for your use case you might construct a target URL like
www.example.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=my_department&utm_campaign=pda_mail&utm_content=<number of characters>
and then get the information from the Aquisition reports in Google Analytics.
If the links do not point to your own homepage you would need to set up an intermediate page that tracks the utm_parameters before it redirects to the intended destination.
I'm having some trouble with GA reports for one of my sites. Since the beginning of the month, GA is reporting URLs instead of keywords under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic, in the "keyword" column.
What can be causing this, and how can I fix it?
--
Additional info:
Have not set up custom filters in this account.
I get mixed keywords and URLs in the same "keyword" column.
Having the same issue I scrutinized my server logs to get to the bottom of this. It seems that most organic searches with the domain as keyword do originate from google maps (and other google services) - when people click the link in the marker on maps the url is transmitted as the search term.
You need to select "Keyword" for the primary dimension. You've likely selected "Landing Page".
What you are observing is a normally possible scenario. In organic search report, under keywords column, GA will list the search keywords which showed your sites in the search engine result and subsequently led to an incoming traffic.
Let the website which your tracking using analytics be http://www.abc.com . Now assume someone searches , say in google, by giving a full url like http://www.xyz.com instead of just a word like xyz and your site link shows up among the search results. Now if this person clicks on your site link in the search results, then google analytics will log this with a traffic source as search>organic and keyword http://www.xyz.com , as used for the search. Now if the person searches using the keywords http://www.xyz.com + someword and your site appears in the search result and the person clicks on it , then in analytics you will see the keyword as http://www.xyz.com + someword which will be combination of url + word. This happens mostly if your site abc.com has some page which links to xyz.com or provides the full link and so your site is also indexed by search engines for searches with that web url.
I'm trying to track the success of marketing campaigns through conversion on a portal. The portal is largely JS based and for right now we can't use URL goal tracking. Instead, I'm planning on using event-based goal conversion that can report all the variables I need. The problem is how do I connect marketing campaigns to the eventual conversion? These campaigns span SEM, email, landing pages, partnerships, etc.
My initial idea was to use a URL param to set a session-level custom variable identifying the marketing campaign that funneled the visitor, and then to compare this to goal conversion. However, I'm not sure custom variables can even be compared to goal conversions in Google Analytics -- and I'm worried that I might be over-thinking this.
I'm worried I'm way over-thinking this. If I create a custom campaign using the URL Builder, will that give me everything I want, allowing me to track campaign conversions?
Yes, I think you are over-thinking things. :-)
As long as you properly tag the campaigns using the utm variables in your destination URLs as they show you how to do in URL builder, they should allow you to see your specific goal conversions by source, medium, campaign, etc. in your GA profile. Using the new Multi-Channel funnels features you'll also be able to see how the sources of previous visits influence future conversion behavior as well.
Generate help with campaign conversion tracking here: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2011/12/02/track-conversions-google-analytics-campaigns/
Info on Multi-Channel funnels here: https://www.google.com/analytics/features/multichannel-funnels.html
I was hoping to to use the analytics api to find out the most popular search terms (organic) that lead to a particular page.
Is this possible?
I've trawled the documentation and found this which looks as if it outlines all possible data I can retrieve from the API and I can't see this information here.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceDimensionsMetrics.html
If this is the case, is there any reason that the API isn't complete? I would assume if I can access the data using the analytics interface then I should be able to query for it using the API - is this assumption incorrect?
Yes, this is possible. For example, if you wanted to see what keywords led to how many entrances to index.html,
Set:
Dimensions: ga:keyword
Metrics: ga:entrances
Segment: gaid::-5
Filters: ga:landingPagePath==/index.html
Sort: -ga:entrances
(Segment gaid::-5 segments the data to only include visits referred from Organic Search; sorting by -ga:entrances will order the number of visits in descending order).
Try it out here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataExplorer.html?dimensions=ga%253Akeyword&metrics=ga%253Aentrances&segment=gaid%253A%253A-5&filters=ga%253AlandingPagePath%253D%253D%252Findex.html&sort=-ga%253Aentrances&start-date=2010-09-23&end-date=2010-10-07&max-results=50
I am trying to build URLs for Google Analytics and Omniture.
GA is simple enough, and those URLs can be built using http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
Campaign Source: * (referrer: google, citysearch, newsletter4)
Campaign Medium: * (marketing medium: cpc, banner, email)
Campaign Term: (identify the paid keywords)
Campaign Content: (use to differentiate ads)
Campaign Name*:
Does anyone know how Omniture links are constructed? Do they support this kind of URL?
Omniture does not grab predefined var=value params from a URL like GA.
What you can do though is use omniture's s.getQueryParam() plugin to grab the same parameters generated by that GA tool, and put them in s.prop and/or s.eVar variables.
The basic Omniture campaign tracking is based on the s.campaign parameter, which can be then re-defined (classified) using the SAINT tool. The "cid" (default) URL parameter only takes one value, by default a running number, which is then classified with SAINT. Fetching the value can be done with a plug-in, such as getQueryParam(), which is recommended.
I don't recommend using prop or eVar variables too much on this, since without DataWarehouse or Discover you can't really use several of them in a segment (max. 2) and this makes using 5 parameters quite useless.
The SAINT tool together with the campaign parameter is quite powerful and should be enough for basic needs.