Google analytics to track impressions/views? - google-analytics

I have a site that lists business listings from a database. On each page you can do different things such as forward it to a friend, print the page etc. My question is could I use google analytics to track impressions and views for each listing? So if I showed the top 10 listings on the home page I want to track each listing as an impression since its being showed, then if they click one of the links to view the business listing it tracks it as a view. Then on the business listing details page if they do any of the actions such as forward to a friend or print the page I want to track that as well.
For tracking views/clicks Im assuming I would need to use setPageView passing something like setPageView('/listing/12345') correct? I dont know how to track it for impressions though. Then on the listing details page to track if they printed it etc Im assuming I would track it as an event? Such as trackEvent('listing', 'Print') if that is what I need to do for event how does it associate with the page tracking so that I could see how many times someone printed the listing page for /listings/12345?

No need to create fake page views. Google Analytics has a feature called Event Tracking, which is described in the Event Tracking Guide. The guide has an illustrative example;
A simple example illustrates how you might use the Event Tracking method
to record user interaction with a video Play link on your page. It
assumes that pageTracker is the name used for your tracking object.
Play
In this scenario, the reports for Events would display Videos as the Category,
Play as the Action, and Baby's First Birthday as the Label.
In your case, you would track Views and Clicks using the Event Tracking feature. You'd have to decide on how you'd want Actions, Categories and Labels set up to match your data. You might want package types (Gold, Silver etc) as Categories or Labels, for example.
This question and its answers are similar to your scenario.

Related

How to set goals for phone call

I'd like to know how to set goals for phone calls in Google Analytics.
For instance, when someone calls our hotline via our website (devtraco.com), I'd like the ability to track such hits. I tried setting up a goal for this by using event conditions but I'm being asked to provide a category name, action, and label.
I'm not sure what to fill in these fields so kindly help.
You can track click on phone number as a event and then set it up as a goal. If you need to track happened phone call, you need Call Tracking (some third-party service).
Assuming your site is sending GA events for tel links, then you first need to find the event category that is being set. This can be found on the main Events page:
Now you can create a custom goal from the Admin screen that counts events with that category. Leave all the other fields blank except category.
As noted, this will give you the number of times your tel links are clicked. If you want more in depth tracking like call duration, you'd need to setup call tracking through a 3rd party service.

Google Tag Manager. Tracking link click through a funnel

I had a question about Google Tag Manager. (I also felt bad for having the IT guy fix my mistakes on my simple click tag)
I wanted to track when a user enters a specific url when they click a link button on the homepage.
This is what it looks like
Image
This is my idea on what the Tag and Trigger should look like
Image
But I'm worried about having the trigger be fired when there is another page in the funnel
Also if the only way to do this is in the goal feature of GA that is good to know also. (I currently don't have the permissions here)
Thanks for responses
While it is difficult to achieve exactly what you're describing (it would involve storing data in cookies and then using these cookies to conditionally fire tags), there is a better way to achieve what I assume is your ultimate objective: an analysis of the shopping funnel.
Specifically, the Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce module has a dedicated report (the Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior report) that shows you exactly this. It shows you the number of sessions for each stage of your shopping experience (product view -> add to cart -> checkout -> purchase) along with drop-off rates and volumes between each of these steps.
It is a little bit more involved to implement enhanced ecommerce but the final result is definitely worth it for an ecommerce business. Instructions for implementation of enhanced ecommerce (using Google Tag Manager) can be found here.
GTM is hit based without any notion of persistence. So by default this will not work.
You would need a custom HTML tag with a javascript function that sets a cookie, or writes a value to localstorage, when the button is clicked.
Then on your destination page you can check if the cookie exists and fire the tag accordingly.
I don't think the goal feature in GA can do that, either. A goal is registered when you hit a destination URL or event, you cannot specify conditions other than the destination.

How to show pages visited during sessions marked with a custom variable in Google Analytics?

I embed custom links into each resume I send out, so I can see who as clicked on the links. I then take the custom value (passed through a url parameter) and pass it into Google Analytics as a session level custom variable. What I want to do is create a report that will show me all the typical information I can normally see (pages visited, time, etc), but filtered down by custom variables. i.e. I want to see that people form company X have looked at these parts of my website. I've been reading through all the documentation and feel like a custom report is the right way to go, but I'm not really sure. Any suggestions, links, instructions would be appreciated.
Create a custom report. Play around with some configuration like the following:

Google Analytics Tracking Conversions with vendor data and custom campaigns

Please help me understand this. I have a client for whom we created a sweepstakes "mini site". Traffic was generated through banner ads, eBlasts, and newsletters. For the banner ads, I created custom urls, i.e. www.somewhere.com?utm_source=yahoo?utm_campaign=abc to track the traffic to the landing page per vendor/banner. this works just fine.
The entrant visits the page, signs up for the sweepstakes, has as double opt in email process for verification. All of my entering traffic to the landing page is tracking fine, and is properly broken down by utm_source and utm_campaign.
Some of the vendors had me place tracking pixels on the confirmation page for conversion statistics. The only info I have placed for internal tracking on the confirmation page is the GA tracking code.
I have been told to create tracking pixels to track the individual vendor conversions. Is this possible without the originating pixel data from the vendor? I am new to tracking pixels, but my understanding is that I need some information from the vendor in order to write the code for the pixel. Am I wrong?
I can't understand how we can place a tracking pixel on our end without at least campaign name or data from the vendor's tracking pixel that they placed on the page containing our banner ads.
What am I missing here? How can I actually separate the conversion traffic from the different sources when everyone receives the same double-opt-in email?
Please ask me to clarify if I am not being clear. Thanks in advance for reading my question.
There are two things you are trying to track here. One is Campaigns: Campaigns are how you measure the effectiveness of techniques to bring users to your site.
The other thing you are tracking is Events - this is what users are doing once they arrive at your site. If you want to track individual vendor conversions, you should add an onclick handler to either the submit button, or link that you are calling a "conversion"
For example:
Your link here
If you are adding the push to a form submit, you might want to have that push happen on the pageload of the success page, rather than the onClick of the submit (otherwise it will track the event, and it might not have actually happened due to form validation errors for example)

tracking users with google analytics after they leave my domain to make a purchase and come back

I would like to track where users originally came from when they make a purchase on my site so I know which keywords are more profitable and which websites are best for advertising.
an example is a user is on my site with my google analytics tracking code which has details of where they came from, and then decides to upgrade. they leave my domain to go to my biller (2checkout) complete the purchase and return to my thank you page.
I have transaction code and analytics code on my thank you page and the transactions are showing up with the correct product/amounts in GA however there is no other data and in my reports the referring url is always my biller or a credit card companies authorisation page.
i can manually connect which customer is which by saving their referring data when they first come to the site and then matching it up after they make a sale, but I would like it to show up in my google adwords / analytics account where it is easier to manipulate the data and see trends.
if anyone can help me with this annoying issue I would be vbery greatful, but I fear I may end up living off reports I create and then matching them up with adwords manually :/
One thing you can do is have a click event trigger a custom variable. When the user clicks on whatever link that takes them to your biller, have the custom variable trigger with the information you want to carry over (like the current page URL, some campaign name, whatever). Specify the custom variable's scope as Session or Visit so that it get associated with the thank you page.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html
An alternative is to do campaign tracking:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55540
That is more or less the same principle as the first suggestion, but with using specified URL parameters. Depending on how your pages are actually coded, you may need to push a virtual page view with the campaign code(s):
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55521

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