I am using Google Analytics and would like to see how users interact with my site, mainly what internal links they are clicking and from where.
One approach I've found is to add queries to my links like so ?ref=sidebar or ?ref=featured
Another approach is to use Event Tracking _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Article', 'Click', 'Sidebar']);
I am wondering: Is there any reason to use one approach over the other? I know Event Tracking can be used to capture Javascript events, which queries cannot. But most sites I've seen also uses Event Tracking on their links, instead of simply adding a query string. Why is that?
Query Strings make different unique urls. So if you add query strings to your pages the pages report will show multiple entries for (basically) the same url depending on how people got there, e.g.:
subsite.html
subsite.html?ref=sidebar
subsite.html?ref=featured
each with it's own pageview count and other metrics.
Usually you do not want this. Event tracking is better since it does not blow up the url count (there might be be even better ways, especially if you upgrade to Universal Analytics and use custom dimensions).
Related
I'm trying to track pageviews on certain types of pages across multiple websites with different url structures (which rules out using a RegEx to segment a common section of the URLs). Is it possible to track page loads with an event script? Would it be used as an onLoad event?
You CAN utilize regex to accomplish this, though it does depend on how many rules you have.
Example if you want to include these two urls:
www.google.com/inventory/example
www.microsoft.com/vehicle/example2
you can use
.*(\/inventory\/|\/vehicle\/).*
Another option is to use Google Data Studio and create a calculated field based on the "page" dimension and filter/group using CASE function.
I am really new to Google Analytics and I had a requirement of tracking clicks and impressions. I followed following link
http://www.statstory.com/tracking-clicks-and-impressions-in-google-analytics/
and sucessfully implemented the same.
Now my requirement is to get the no.of clicks and no. of impressions
to my html page. I am googled for past quite hours but couldnot find
any luck with the same.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
You should really consider implementing Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce functionality.
Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce
In regards to answering your question of the API, you should query it asking for events. Namely category, action and label events and apply a filter to only return the data you wish to receive, such as 'Impressions' as a filter for 'Event Action'. That will return all impressions and if you instead change the filter to use 'Click', you'd get all clicks instead.
If you followed the above guide and made it into Universal, then you'd see the calls you set and it is set up in the following way:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Banner', 'Click', 'BANNERNAME',1.00,true]);
This bit of code pushes (legacy version) Analytics data in the form of:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label',1.00,true]);
So, changing the different sections means you change how you define the data and how it will be visible in reports. Category defines the Event Category, Action defines the Event Action and Label defines the Event Label.
Take a look at the core development guide. Also, here you can see all the API calls available: Dimension & Metrics explorer for Google Analytics
I gather that you want to track impressions for banner advertising that is displayed by yourself (i.e. not through an adserver) in your website.
I agree with Mr Sponge that you should upgrade to Universal Analytics. if you want to implement enhanced e-commerce tracking (EEC) you probably want to read about Measuring internal Promotions, which is a feature specifically build for that kind of reporting.
If you just need the raw number of banner impressions and/or need a solution that's easier to implement (but less capable) you can increment a custom metric every time you banner shows up (this is basically a counter, you might want to use it together with a custom dimension that holds the banner name). Click tracking would still be done by events (with similar custom metrics and dimensions). From that data you can assemble a custom report and use a calculated metric for click through rates etc.
Not as good as EEC by a fair margin but much easier to do.
General setting
I have a website, which uses regular and encrypted urls. Now I want to track the pageviews or all pages the same way.
I have regular URLs like this:
/library.dll?page=page12&arg1=0&arg2=some&session_id=7892734
and special pages like this:
/library.dll?page=specialpage&arg1=0&arg2=some&session_id=7892734&id=page13
aswell as encrypted URLs like this, which are also containing the session id:
/library.dll?page=encrypted&args=gYZEI7lnRAQLzVXdtdbcral8.cOoc6NDtMUGY2yep9wO3JM
So the interesting niformation is always the page, which is in this examples page12, page13 and page14 (where page14 is also part of the encrypted string).
Clarification
I can change the HTML and JS code only. I have no access to the Google Analytics interfaces at all. This will be administrated by multiple customers.
The GA code will be integrated within a template using a customer-specific code and their unique tracking id.
Problem description
I need to track the page argument, because this is basically the interesting part of the url. When tracking other url parameters I cannot accumulate the pageviews for a certain page, because Google Analytics shows them as separate pages.
In addition I don't see any way to track the pageviews with encrypted URLs, because I cannot set a generic name for them unless there is a way to utilize the method ga('send', 'pageview');
Solution idea
I read about overwriting the pageview attributes like this:
ga('send', 'pageview', '/my-overridden-page?id=1');
in the article on page tracking #Google Developers
Utilizing (event) triggers is in my opinion a pretty bad idea.
The question itself
Is there any smarter way to track this information? Is extracting the page-information and overwriting the pageview attributes the best way to do this?
I just started using GA and have kind of no idea how to do this any other way.
You could use filters (custom advanced filters) to rewrite the request url inside the google admin interface (admin->views->filters). This has the advantage that you do not need to change your site/application code.
However using filters will require multi-step-filters with heavy use of regular expressions, and you would have to test this in a "staging" view first (because a wrong filter will permanently mess up your data).
Passing a custom url to the pageview tracking is pretty straightforward and can be tested immediately via the real time view. In my opinion this is indeed the smartest way to do this.
I'm doing custom-rolled view tracking on my website, and I just realize that I totally forgot about search bots hitting the pages. How do I filter out that traffic from my view tracking?
Look at the user-agents. It might seem logical to blacklist, that is filter out all the strings that contain "Googlebot" or other known search engine bots, but there are so many of them, it could well be easiest to just to whitelist: log visitors using a known browser.
Another approach would be to use some JavaScript to do the actual logging (like Google Analytics does). Bots won't load the JS and so won't count toward your statistics. You can also do a lot more detailed logging this way because you can see exactly (down to the pixel - if you want) which links were clicked.
You can check the user agent: here there is a nice list.
Or you could cross-check with the hits on robots.txt, since all the spiders should read that first and users usually don't.
I am setting up a website for students of a school, which must include a schedule page which will show a calendar with events populated by feeds from various teachers' calendars. After trying out a variety of scripts and tools made for showing calendars, I finally hit upon a very shoddy, hacked-together way of doing it, and I want to know if theres any specific things wrong with my implementation.
My requirements from this calendar are posted in a previous question
This is how my implementation is gonna work:
The teachers make their schedules in their own calendar programs and make those feeds available in the iCal format. A common Google account for the school subcribes to all these calendars, and so gets read only access to ALL the teacher's schedules in school.
Google Calendar has a feature that lets you select some of your calendars, and then get the html code for an iframe to embed on your website, so that visitors to the site can see what events are coming up. When I experimented around with the options in the Google 'Configurator', I found that by simply including certain codes in the url called for the iframe contents, you could change which calendars were visible. These codes, or calendar ids, are clearly displayed in the settings for each calendar. Thus, my final solution is thus:
For every student, there is a record stating which courses he has taken, and hence which calendars he should be shown. With some SQL magic, I can retrieve the calendar ids from a pre-prepared database of all the calendar ids, and then generate the correct url for the iframe using php, and display it.
I hope that wasn't too convoluted to understand. Now can anyone tell me if there are any inherent security flaws or bad programming practices etc in this. Something about the whole idea of dynamically generating urls, using iframes, using a common google account etc just screams 'Mistake!'. Can someone tell me if this is an ok way to go about it, or is there some problem with it?
Actually, I think your solution has the potential to be very secure. Using a single google account to collect the read-only calendars into one place is just an organizational shortcut. As long as the calendars themselves are read-only, your single account contains nothing that isn't already public.
Generating URLs is perfectly reasonable, as long as you are combining strings that you've sanitized beforehand. Since your database can only get calendar IDs from your aggregation google account, you know that potentially malicious users can't cause arbitrary characters to end up in your synthesized URLs.
The biggest problem you'll probably run into is that the google embedded calendar iframe only allows up to ten calendar feeds.
The most likely security vulnerability you'll face is the security of all of the teachers' google calendars.
By default, google calendars accept "invitations" and post them as events. You might find that anyone can "invite" a teacher's calendar to prank events and those prank events will then show up on student calendars.