Which is the best place to put google analytics, the header or footer. Can I put it before the tag or can it be along with the scripts before the closing body tag
both the ga.js version and analytics.js version officially state to put it just before the closing </head> tag. But just between you, me and the fence post, there is no significant difference regardless of where you put it. Some people like putting the whole thing in the head tag. Some people like putting it in the footer. Some people like splitting the code up so that they can more easily have custom code sandwiched inbetween (I personally like this style the best). Each school of thought will claim it's the bestest and other methods are stupidest. The war rages on.
Look at it that way: You implement GA in the footer and a problem occurs. Then you go to a help site and say "I have a problem with my code and btw. I did not implement it according to Googles documentation because I did not feel it was necessary". At that point most people will tell you to fix your code and report back later.
So in the worst case you do not loose anything by doing it right, in the best case you have skipped one annoying step with trouble shooting. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
To address Crayons argument that it is not necessary to identify partially loading sites (see discussion in the comments to his answer): These will be most likely sites where users exit the page due to the errors, so you want to have them in your tracking (since this will show you where your site needs fixing). Unless all you want is a page counter in which case GA is a bit overfeatured anyway.
(Btw. this is an answer to your question "which is the best place". Should you have meant "Will Google Analytics still track most things if I implement it any-old-where" then the answer is "yes", as Crayon has pointed out).
Related
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 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.
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).
Understanding all the security and UI concerns with iFrames, I am implementing a toolbar similar to the DiggBar or FacebookBar.
A top bar persists across the top 30 pixels of the screen, and an iFrame displaying external content fills up the remainder of the page.
When users close the toolbar, and thereby exit my little site to go directly to the third-party site, how can I bust the iFrame properly and display the right page? If the user clicks on even one link in the iFrame, I end up showing the wrong page.
Given my understanding of browser security, and coupled with how DiggBar and FacebookBar fail to do this accurately, I'm guessing it cannot be done.
But I was hoping the Stackoverflow coders are smarter and might have an answer? :)
Thanks!
You can't. Because of browser cross site-scripting security, your bar which sits in its own frame cannot access any other frames and determine their URLs.
Not to mention that'll you'll be sued by website owners for numerous things and that you'll piss off every hacker out there.
This is the last thing you want to do if you'd like to NOT in your our office as that one guy who wanted to include everyone elses web site in their website with the owners permission.
I wouldn't speak up at any of the conventions either.
I've also added the question: "Have you ever written code or worked on code that frames other sites?" to my list of questions to use to weed out job applicants.
This might fall under the category of "you can't", but I thought it might be prudent to at least see if there is something I can do about this.
According to FireBug, the major bottleneck in my page loading times seems to be a gap between the loading of the html and the loading of Google adsense and analytics. Notice in the screenshot below that the initial GET only takes 214 ms, and that adsense + analytics loading takes roughly 130 ms combined. However, the entire page load time is 1.12 seconds due to that large pause in between the initial GET and the adsense/analytics loading.
If it makes any difference at all, the site is running off of the ASP.NET MVC RC1 stack.
alt text http://kevinwilliampang.com/pics/firebug.jpg
Update: After removing adsense and analytics, I'm still seeing a slow response time. Hovering over the initial GET request, I see that the following speeds: 96ms Receiving Data, 736ms DOMContentLoaded (event), 778ms 'load' (event). I'm guessing then that the performance is a result of my own jQuery javascript that has processing tied to the ($document).ready() event?
You should place your analytics code at the bottom of the page so that everything else loads first. Other than that, I don't think there's much you can do.
edit: Actually, I just found this interesting blog post on a way to speed up analytics by hosting your own urchin.js file. Maybe it's worth a look.
I've never seen anything like that using Firebug on Stack Overflow and we use Analytics as well.
I just ran a trace and I see the request for the
http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?...
Happening directly after the DOMContentLoaded event (the blue line). So I'd suspect the AdSense, first. Have you tried disabling that?
As it goes, I happen to have rather heavily researched this just this week. Long story short, you are screwed. As others have said the best you can do is put it at the bottom of the list of requests and make the rest of your code depend on ready rather than onload events - jQuery is really good here. Some portion of the js is static, so you could clone that locally if you keep an eye on it for maintenance purposes.
The google code isn't quite as helpful as it could be in this area*, but it's their ballgame and anything you do to change it is going to be both complex and risky. In theory, wrapping with a non-blocking script call in the header is possible, but would be unlikely to gain you a benefit given the additional abstraction, and ultimately with adsense your payload is an html source, not script.
* it's possible google have a good reason, but nothing I can deduce from the code they expose
Probably not anything you can do aside from putting those includes right before the closing body tag, if you haven't already. JavaScript includes block parallel HTTP requests which is why they should be kept out of <head>
Surely Google's servers will be the fastest part of the loading, given that your ISP and most ISPs will have a local cache of the files too?
You could inject the script into the head on page load perhaps, but I'm not sure how that effects urchin.js.
Could be that your page simply takes that long to parse? It seems nothing network-related is happening. It simply waits around a second before the adsense/analytics requests are even fired off.
I don't suppose you have a few hundred tables on the page or something? ;)