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.
Related
I have a custom build page where users can filter products based on price, category, brand, ...
These are made out of checkboxes and a range input for the price.
I'm trying to figure out what the best way would be to track every action/filter in order to find out which brand / categories are the most popular.
Important to know
The menu contains a submenu for the categories. When the user clicks one of these links the filterpage will have this category checked in the filters.
The page does not reload when applying a filter. I'm using JS to perform a search and show new results. The page url gets updated with the correct search query parameters.
I think I have 2 options:
Track click events on the checkboxes and send every change with datalayer.push.
Track the page URL after each filter.
Option 1 is an issue because people might go to the page with some parameters in the URL. This won't be tracked because there was no click event. This issue will also apply to users that click the category in the submenu that prefills the filter.
Option 2 also is an issue because with this solution the category might be tracked 5 times if the user keeps adding or removing other filters. It always tracks all filters instead of the one that has been added.
The first step of tracking is using the analog of Occam's Razor. You want to cut off stuff that has no chance of answering legit business questions.
Your business question here is: What filters are the most helpful for the users? Now it's important to know why the business wants to know it. Cuz remember, the business is not very competent at data analysis even if it doesn't realize it.
So you need to know exactly how answering that question improves OKRs/KPIs. In this case, the legit answer could be: cuz we want to sort the filters by the usage frequency and measure if that would ease the engagement and thus, improve the conversion rate for the part of the journey from the product list to the pdp
That's a pretty weak reason, but passable. Especially if there's an issue in that transition currently.
Good, now having that context, why would we want to track filters used in pre-populated urls? Say some overzealous employee made a mistake and pre-populated some weird unneeded filter using, say, date and time of when the product has been added. And now they use that URL in all ads, so you get a lot of third party traffic coming to product lists with a date as a filter.
And then, let's say, that employee keeps using that filter for other persistent links to the effect of the date/time filter becoming uncanningly popular. There. Your data slowly becomes garbage and stops answering the original question.
There are other issues with tracking pre-set filters, some of which you've outlined, but the real issue is the ability of the data to answer good business questions clearly. Tracking all filters may be able to answer some technical questions, but it's not the aim of behavioral analytics to answer technical questions. Let them use access logs and whatever else they use to answer those.
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/
I'm a consumer data analyst who is not very familiar to coding other than occasional encounters with HTML and Python, and I'm just starting with the coding part of Web Analytics. In particular, I need to learn about checking websites I don't own (therefore I don't have access to their Analytics accounts) for tracking info, but it has been phenomenally hard to find information on which tracking function each component of code stand for, or to what extent it is visible from the page source.
For a project, here is a page I'm trying to check for Google Analytics/Tag Manager/alternative analytics setup, and see what is exactly being tracked on it. Other than the source code, I checked it with Ghostery, which gave me this Tag Manager code page. Is it possible to check tracking info from these two (events, pageviews, URI and how many custom dimensions there is, specifically), and which part of the code includes that info (particularly URI and dimension info - the first two, I have more idea about)?
This is a page I'm also looking into. I can see that this one has Google Analytics/Tag manager, but again, I can't make sure of what is being tracked, and whether the Analytics/Tag Manager setup is looking -potentially- problematic in any way. Here is the Tag Manager page for this one that I obtained through Ghostery.
Any help would be much appreciated...
Looks like what you are looking for is Google Tag Assistant extension for google chrome: https://get.google.com/tagassistant/
you can download it from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tag-assistant-by-google/kejbdjndbnbjgmefkgdddjlbokphdefk?hl=en
When you install it it will appear as icon on any page you visit and it will show you all GA implementations on a page:
You can select tracking ID you are interested in and it will tell you how many Page Views/events were fired for that particular tracking ID only:
Then you can select individual tracking event/page view and see all data that are being sent with that tracking request. Just Click on URLs and click the icon to put the data in table:
Here "cd" stands for Custom Dimension, so here you can clearly see 2 custom dimensions that are being tracked:
Hope this helps, good luck!
I am trying to find a clear method of tracking clicks to external sites from a site I have built, it appears a lot of information available on this is contradictory or incomplete. I have found autotrack.js on Github which looks like a simpler method, so my question is three-fold, I'll make the question super clear so there is a super clear answer for others in the same conundrum as me.
What snippet/script is added to the HTML and where? I currently have the standard GA snippet for tracking page loads before the </body> tag.
Should I amend / edit the <a> tags to make sense of the who clicked what? I.e. name them, can this be avoided or automated, what I mean is there a script smart enough to name it the same as the destination, like reallygoodlist.com or fb.com/reallygoodlist ?
Is there any GA work required? Set up Goals etc, ideally I would be looking to avoid this - I have a lot of links.
Here is my site (if it helps):
http://www.reallygoodlist.com
1) What snippet/script is added to the HTML and where? I currently have the standard GA snippet for tracking page loads before the tag.
The installation and usage section of the autotrack documentation shows how to install autotrack, so I'll just link to it rather than repeating.
If you're just using the default GA tag, you can probably copy/paste most of the code there, changing the parts relevant to you: e.g. if you only care about outbound link tracking, then only include the outboundLinkTracker plugin.
It also looks like you're installing code via npm, so in this case you can link autotrack's source file in the node_modules directory as you've done with the Babel polyfill.
<script src="node_modules/autotrack/autotrack.js"></script>
2) Should I amend / edit the tags to make sense of the who clicked what ? i.e. name them, can this be avoided or automated, what i mean is ether a script smart enough to name it the same as the destination, like reallygoodlist.com or fb.com/reallygoodlist ?
Autotrack's outboundLinkTracker plugin automatically sets the link's URL as the event label, so you probably don't need to do anything unless that's not enough.
If you want more control than that, setting one of the common options will allow you to custom any data that is sent to GA.
3) Is there any GA work required? Set up Goals etc, ideally I would be looking to avoid this - I have a lot of links.
Not for outbound link tracking. It's just tracking the data as events, so you'll be able to find them in your event reports in GA.
I've implemented GA on our b2b site. It's strictly internal but we'd like to track behaviors of users to see if some of the sections on the site are relevant. So, it's working, but say you have
www.blahblah.com and you want to also track
www.blahblah.com/edit
www.blahblah.com/askquestion
Do you set up a filter for this? I did try it and not sure if it's working quite yet. Any info/advice would be greatly appreciated. I am brand new to GA.
Thanks
Not quite sure what you are asking.
If you want to know about metrics for the individual pages you'd go to to the Aquisition->Page Content reports. Overview will give you, well, an overview (you can use the filter box to look at the metrics for any specific Url), Content Drilldown will display a view structured by url hierarchy.
If you're after user behaviour you can create segments. If you want to know if somebody vistited the homepage and, after that, the /edit page you'd got to advanced segments (the arrow above the "Explorer" Tab in most views, click "create new segment", choose "sequence" from the advanced tab, choose page as dimension and "/" to filter for as step one, "/edit" as filter value for page two, enter a name for the segment and click save. Now you'll get all reports only for visitors who have visited those two pages, starting with the homepage.
There are a number of predefined segments, you should try them to see what they can do. You need a pretty good understanding of metrics and dimensions in GA to get the full value from segments, but the simple stuff (e.g. analyze differences between marketing channels) is already pretty useful.
So, for page performance seek out reports with page metrics and use filters. To analyze user behavior use segments which apply to most of the GA reports.
Hope that helps, if not you might to explain more specifically what you want to see in your reports.
You can create separate custom report for individual sections and drilldown by almost all the GA provided dimensions. please reffer the sampel provided.
Please access this URL in your browser as this is a predefined custom report which does the same thing you want. This will get saved under custom reports. You need to edit the custom report and give your own path/section insted of "/services/" under filters section