Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface
Update: following lots of peoples questions I have posted Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2
Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service.
The user interface had a major redesign in May 2007 and a lot of the features we love have become hard to find. This guide should help you find your way around the new system.
I see a lot of comments on the forums asking whether Analytics can do X, Y and Z. In most cases it can do it but people just don’t realise it. As webmaster of several large sites I have been using GA for around a year now to track a huge number of variables. In this post I will go through a few of the more obscure interactions that GA can tack on your site.
Tracking exit clicks, banner clicks and RSS feed subscribers
Have you ever wanted to know how many people clicked on a particular link or banner on your site? You may wish to find out how many people click on an affiliate link, how many people from a certain country click on your banner advert or even the number of visitors from Digg that clicked to sign up to your RSS feed.
GA can track this for you quite easily by simply adding an onClick event to your hyperlink code.
<a href="http://www.example.co.uk" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outgoing/rssfeed'); ">
Every time somebody clicks on the link above GA will register a page view on the page www.yoursite.com/outgoing/rssfeed. To view the stats for the link you will need to follow the directions below:
In your GA account visit Content > Top Content and you will see the most popular pages on your site. Enter the term “outgoing” into the filter box as shown below and you will see a list of all the pages on your site with “outgoing” in the url. Normally this will just show exit clicks unless you happen to have real pages with “outgoing” as part of the url.
To drill down into the data simply click on the url you are interested in and you will see a snapshot of data like the image below.
(screenshot courtesy of Gas Fires Galore) If you want to drill down further by clicking on the “Segment:” drop down menu you can see details such as the source of the visitors, the keywords they were searching for and the landing page they arrived on.
This data is extremely valuable to webmasters who are not selling products. Sites selling products can measure ROI accurately by looking at the profits made on a particular sale compared to the cost of obtaining the visitor whether by SEO or Pay Per Click marketing. If you don’t sell products you need to place a value on other aspects of your site. How much are you willing to pay to acquire another blog subscriber? Was the $5000 you spent on link bait worthwhile?
All these actions can be tracked using the onClick event in Google Analytics.
More information at the Google Help Section.
How do I track downloads?
Downloads can be tracked again using the onClick event as above:
<a href="http://www.example.co.uk/files/map.pdf" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/downloads/map'); ">
Tracking ecommerce revenue
Tracking where your visitors come from is very important. Tracking where your actual customers came from is even more important. If you knew that people searching for your keywords on MSN Live were twice as likely to buy your product as people searching on Google you can happily bid far more for your Adcenter clicks as your Adwords clicks.
Sales reports by traffic sources can be found under the “Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources” section of the menu.
Before explaining how to track your transactions lets look at the data that GA can provide on this subject. These figures are for April 2007. Some details are blocked out for privacy reasons.
Lets drill down into the stats for Google (keywords removed):
From the chart above we can see that some keywords earn £31.52 per visit whereas some only earn £5.72 per visit. This data is hugely valuable as you can adjust your PPC bids on high and low paying keywords to maximise your profits.
GA also lets you drill down to see stats such as the number of people who bought product A after searching Google for Product B.
Now we know why we need to see these stats it makes the task of enabling the tracking slightly more appealing.
How to track Sales
To track your sales you will need to use some server side script on your confirmation page (the page people see after they complete a transaction on your site) to populate a form in the following format:
<body onLoad="javascript:__utmSetTrans()">
<form style="display:none;" name="utmform">
<textarea id="utmtrans">UTM:T|[order-id]|[affiliation]|
[total]|[tax]| [shipping]|[city]|[state]|[country] UTM:I|[order-id]|[sku/code]|[productname]|[category]|[price]|
[quantity] </textarea>
</form>
Example
UTM:T|34535|Main Store|111108.06|8467.06|10.00|San Diego|CA|USA
UTM:I|34535|XF-1024|Urchin T-Shirt|Shirts|11399.00|9
UTM:I|34535|CU-3424|Urchin Drink Holder|Accessories|20.00|2
Once you have populated the form GA will start tracking your sales right away.
The Google Help Section has a good reference guide for this topic.
Tracking 404 errors
Google Analytics makes the process of tracking your 404 errors fairly straightforward. Simply add the code below to your error page and GA will tell you the source of the traffic that is generating the error.
Make sure you replace the xxxxx-x with your GA account number!
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "xxxxx-x";
urchinTracker("/404.html?page=" + _udl.pathname + _udl.search);
</script>
If there are any other advanced features of Google Analytics you would like us to talk about or if you have any questions on how to implement these ideas please post in the comments below :).
Categories: Analytics
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Thank you. Very helpful tips.
Forest June 8, 2007 8:51 am | Reply
Wow - thats very helpful. I had no clue I could do most of these things.
Matt Ellsworth June 10, 2007 1:39 am | Reply
Brilliant article!
Vido June 10, 2007 4:52 pm | Reply
Very helpfull informations you gave us! Thanks again!
Nejc June 11, 2007 6:51 am | Reply
Thank you! I\’m going to install the script for the 404 page today. I had no idea that I could track clicks on my affiliate links outside of linkshare. Thanks!
Snowboarder Steve June 11, 2007 10:39 am | Reply
Great post. Thanks!
Johny X June 11, 2007 5:28 pm | Reply
Is there a way to see stats based on a specific day? I’d love to be able to see which pages are more popular as I’ve changed my site over time. I might change link position or something for a week and it’d be nice to see stats for that time period only to be able to compare them.
Michael June 11, 2007 5:56 pm | Reply
Thanks for this wonderful article. Google Analytics have definitely come a long way from it’s beginnings as Urchin.
David June 11, 2007 6:11 pm | Reply
How do we track flash movie plays with google analytics?
hunter June 11, 2007 6:24 pm | Reply
The worst change in their beta is the Geographic map. Now, instead of being able to get useful information at a glimpse (the scattering and concentration of bubbles on a map); you now have to drill-down several layers to get anything useful.
The idea of grouping entire continents (the Americas as a single continent) make for a worthless summarization — esp given large bubbles that you could previously discount as anomolies now skew an entire geographic region.
Please, Google, change this back to the way it was.
Adam Selene June 11, 2007 6:36 pm | Reply
Thanks some very helpful tips. Is there anyway to attach the onclick event handler on a link I want to track without editing the html, perhaps at the bottom of the page? Just wondering if it is possible to separate the HTML from the javascript so it is easier to maintain.
LGR June 11, 2007 7:05 pm | Reply
There are some things still only available in the old UI though, such as graphing country-specific visitors.
(odd how many f4rrests there are reading this, eh?).
f4rrest June 11, 2007 8:07 pm | Reply
Surely there is javascript to add that javascript to every external link? it seems dumb to have to rewrite your whole application.
Motorcycle Guy June 11, 2007 8:25 pm | Reply
bravo. lots of interesting tips in here!
celsius June 11, 2007 8:39 pm | Reply
I allow my users to place Google analytics on the blogs that my site (http://www.dealminded.com) generates automatically. I think Ill add a few of these features for them as well…. Thanks!
Jeff June 11, 2007 10:11 pm | Reply
Thanks a lot. I lost hairs on my head trying to figure some of this stuff out over the last few weeks.
seo ranter June 11, 2007 10:35 pm | Reply
VERY useful tips, thanks!
mark June 11, 2007 11:31 pm | Reply
Good article. Can GA be used to track registered users and their activity on site?
Slides June 11, 2007 11:39 pm | Reply
Google is still lacking when it comes to actual rss requests from readers unfortunately. It would be awesome to get something that registers actual requests instead of just clicks. Might be impossible though since it’s all xml.
Peter June 11, 2007 11:41 pm | Reply
Thanks
But now lots of work to do.
In the end a person says - how did i ever live without these tools
But yet at the front end of the boat it takes a lot of weight, time and effort
fisher June 12, 2007 12:23 am | Reply
Nice one
Vinod June 12, 2007 12:46 am | Reply
I would love to know how to view the pages sending traffic in the referring information statistics. Not just the domian but a link to the actuall page sending traffic.
darnit June 12, 2007 1:19 am | Reply
Newbies like me, will definitely be surprised, how you guys find these kind of secretive information.
Awesome… dude. I am going to use this for my site http://talentshakes.com
Nick.
Nick June 12, 2007 1:30 am | Reply
Thanks for all your comments and questions, I will be writing a new post on the blog next week to answer all the comments in this thread.
Patrick
Patrick Altoft June 12, 2007 3:59 am | Reply
great article!!
daryoko rispurwanto June 12, 2007 4:48 am | Reply
This is definitely useful. Awesome
Planet Malaysia June 12, 2007 4:49 am | Reply
Excellent, a non-intrusive way to track outgoing links. Thanks!
Jason Davies June 12, 2007 5:13 am | Reply
I purpose you a greasemonkey user script to add an external link to see referers on Google Analytics. You can see it here
srcmax June 12, 2007 7:41 am | Reply
any reason the page is scrolling horizontally ??? Or is it just my funky computer ?
paul June 12, 2007 8:24 am | Reply
Jonny X, I think you’re looking for something more like http://www.Ranktrend.com
It complements Google Analytics and gives you a pretty good visualization of your ranking trends.
SuperJason June 12, 2007 8:48 am | Reply
Great article! I too am amazed at how much Google provides for free, although you have to look around for it. Thanks so much!
Jeff McCann June 12, 2007 9:31 am | Reply
wicked article thanks
psychic readings June 12, 2007 10:51 am | Reply
Thanks for this quick article.
note that most of your examples are achieved using filters instead of modifying your page code
Also, if you want to track all outbound links, consider using a modified version of this wordpress plugin:
http://cavemonkey50.com/code/google-analyticator/
Cheers from the capital of Europe
Julien
Julien Coquet June 12, 2007 2:25 pm | Reply
I’ve added the 404 reporting code. I can see from GA that the page is being viewed, but how do I tell what the source page was?
Zwirko June 13, 2007 9:49 am | Reply
Is there a way to automatically log all your outgoing links without having to manually add all those links to your archives?
The plugin mentioned above by Julien looks a bit buggy (from the comments).
Would anyone be able to write some code to autotag certain links using JS to achieve this result? Something that would look for a certain link (you specify) and automatically add the onlick event? Is that possible?
markus941 June 14, 2007 3:25 pm | Reply
Hello,
<
BR>
First off thank you for the postings, really apprecaited! Ok, so I have conversion tracking on for adwords java, then I have google analytics java, then I put in the servier side script and that javascript above on my “thank you page”. However I don’t see any results or open columns in my interface for sales tracking. Any help or recommendations would be of great help. Thank you!
LC June 14, 2007 5:55 pm | Reply
You might want to consider modifying your javascript to include keyboard-only users.
John Faulds June 16, 2007 11:43 pm | Reply
Very useful tips!, at least for me!
Thank you!
SKaRCHa June 18, 2007 2:35 pm | Reply
The Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (of which we are one) offer training classes for companies of all types and knowledge levels and have very reasonable fees.
Leslie June 19, 2007 8:21 pm | Reply
Does my comment here increase visibility for ThePrimeSpot.com ?
How so and How much… that is the question!
PS Thanks for sharing this info;)
KaRi from TPSradio June 22, 2007 11:48 am | Reply
My host server does not allow javascript in hosted pages. Is there an HTML version that may only report basic info, but still be a Google interface?
Ted the money broker June 26, 2007 2:02 pm | Reply
My ranking changed but the google bots had not crawled my site in several weeks. How does this happen? It made me wonder if the GA tools are always accurate.
Susan June 26, 2007 2:05 pm | Reply
You dont need Google nor do you need this article. This has all been done better for years using your server logs. Just ask your host provider for a download of your log files, get a free log analyzer, and all that data is there for free.
The problem with this “onclick” solution is its just more client-side scripting your customers have to run in their browser, slowing down your site and putting more dependence on JavaScript. 11% of user world-wide have some scripting turned off, so that would affectively make such tracking useless. Read the logs on your server. Its how most people track what people do in their site. They are quite rich as far as data, too.
stormy July 23, 2007 6:36 am | Reply
Hey Patrick,
although it not being a definitive guide, you do got some great tips there.
Maybe you should add some tips upon analysing and interpreting the results - as many will only see numbers without meaning.
And that while there’s so much to gain from them.
-Dave
Dave Origano July 25, 2007 5:23 am | Reply
This is very useful *bookmarked*.
Kobra's Corner July 26, 2007 8:51 am | Reply
A very good information, I used to use statcounter but it got only 500 users limitation. I will try google analytics
save youtube video August 5, 2007 6:40 pm | Reply
Very valuable for some of my clients and yes if possible it would be great to see more tips of how to use google analytics as it can be one hard program to use.
Thanks
Jermayn Parker August 24, 2007 2:36 am | Reply
Do you have any idea why the volume of page views for a given page shown in the “content detail” report may be LOWER than the volume of page views for the same page but shown in the “Entrance Sources” report? I know this is just an issue of interpreting the report cirrectly but I can’t seem to get my head round it yet.
regards, Hugh
Hugh Gage August 30, 2007 3:36 pm | Reply
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m SO glad this post is at the top of the SERPS for related phrases.
blake September 4, 2007 8:12 pm | Reply
Can you clarify exactly what % New Visits measures? Over what time frame is that percentage? I first assumed it was within the time frame set for the report: If looking at one week’s data, that would be the percent of new visitors in that week - with the inverse being the percentage of repeat visitors within the week.
If my % new visits number is 75%
In that week 75% of the audience is new and 25% came back more than once.
But the math doesn’t work if that’s the case. When I expand the range the % repeat visits should increase as a greater number of users could return within a wider range of time. 1 month should look something more like 60% new and 40% repeat (some don\’t repeat within a week but would within 2 or 4).
I’ve noticed though that the % new visits number stays exactly the same though regardless of the range. As though it is just reporting for today (or historically, that day). If so, what’s the range Google uses to determine if a visitor is repeat?
Paul October 5, 2007 6:51 pm | Reply
Paul, I think you are right, not sure why the maths doesn’t add up.
Try reading this post to see if it explains it a bit more.
Patrick Altoft October 8, 2007 10:53 am | Reply
Excellent article .. very useful
Daniel November 7, 2007 8:08 pm | Reply
Your article post is very useful. Thank you very much.
Cheryl Fuerte November 10, 2007 5:07 am | Reply
How do I add those quick links you see below your main search link on google.com? For instance, the About Us, Careers, etc.
Eddie November 27, 2007 7:43 pm | Reply
Hi,
I’m having a blogger blospot blog. Can you please tell me how to track outgoing clicks and adsense earning for pages (if its possible) using GA?
Thanks
Planet Apex December 18, 2007 9:20 pm | Reply
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Is it possible to track other server errors like 500 errors that can occur sometimes on sites.
Can you build custom reports to filter out specific IPs and set up a report to look at data only from a specific ip.
JD February 5, 2008 9:32 am | Reply
I have always had Google analytics, but never tried this out before. Thanks!
-Tom
my website:
Tom March 13, 2008 12:09 pm | Reply
Thank you ! Thank you ! Thank you ! Thank you ! Thank you ! Thank you !
Laurent March 14, 2008 11:45 pm | Reply
[...] more complex uses of Google Analytics I suggest you read Patrick Altoft’s guide to Advanced Analytics . Here he explains how to track exit clicks, downloads, sales and other valuable data. You can see [...]
The importance of analytics | Technogumption April 5, 2008 4:00 am | Reply
Thanks for all the great tips
I’ve just tried putting in the onClick=”javascript:urchinTracker (’/outgoing/alink’); and also have target=”_blank” in the href code and the target=”_blank” is not being applied. Any ideas for fixing this ?
Thanks
Jim April 28, 2008 3:39 pm | Reply
Sounds like you have missed out a ” at the end of your onclick code.
Patrick Altoft April 28, 2008 3:51 pm |
Patrick - I’d love to say you’re a genius - but that may be overstating it. Anyway it worked - always those simple things !!!
Thanks
Jim April 28, 2008 5:38 pm |
[...] more complex uses of Google Analytics I suggest you read Patrick Altoft’s guide to Advanced Analytics . Here he explains how to track exit clicks, downloads, sales and other valuable data. You can see [...]
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Hello
my website is listed top in google. what is the problem can u guide me. people visit website but they stay for few second and then left. why is so.
help me if you can.
thanks
Amit
Amit May 15, 2008 10:10 am | Reply
I’ve always steered clear of Google Analytics because I don’t like the idea of Google knowing so much. eg if they knew how high a proportion of my visitors come from google itself, then they might downgrade the site.
Do you think this is a valid concern?
Sarah May 31, 2008 12:09 am | Reply
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google track June 3, 2008 1:53 am | Reply
i have never used this product before. This is a good post in learning how to get into the game.
YouYap.com June 4, 2008 12:51 pm | Reply
Good info, but how to track every outgoing click and not to mess placing the code in every link? Is it possible to install major GA code that registers every possible outgoing click?
Boris C. June 22, 2008 6:43 pm | Reply
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Thanks for a very educational post. I use Google Analytics and didn’t realize this stuff was available.
Brisbane web designer July 4, 2008 12:40 pm | Reply
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Hi,
Great post. Can anyone help with the following. We use a generic keyword as well as numerous specific ones and want to track which product our customer actually buys. This will show up in Conversions and Revenue but we understand from GA that they can only show a total figure for Revenue. We need to know the specific amount for each transaction and product the customer buys.Any suggestions?
Ken Wyatt July 24, 2008 11:43 am | Reply
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