After looking after my blog the last few months or so, and going through and making continual tweaks, its time to start making sure my analytics data is tracking correctly. Also, there is no point having analytics data if I haven’t set up my goals in analytics that match the objectives I set out before even putting the blog online.
Now for this website, I would like people to leave a comment or to contact me via email or even follow me on twitter. So to do that correctly, I need to tag my links so as my analytics program can recognise that those particular links are part of a path/funnel and important to me.
Google Analytics allows me to do this by adding a snippet of Javascript to my anchor tag and giving it a psuedo URL, in effect, tricking Analytics into thinking its a page view.
The snippet of code looks like this:onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('psuedo-url-goes-here');"
What this does is let Google Analytics know that this link coresponds to a "page", allowing for the click to be registered as a page view, under the address that you specify. So that way, when you view your Content Report, you can monitor the "page views" (in relatity, the clicks) that link received.
Now if that link is important to your funnels or your goal paths, the psuedo-url that you specify can be part of the steps. Once again, you can see if people arrive to your social media page, and then click through to your profile (eg. your Twitter homepage).
Now I know what I am presenting today isn’t rocket science, or new information, but I feel its a vital step for anyone that is just starting in Analytics, or something that search marketers don’t feel important. My opinion is the fact that if people aren’t clicking through or finding the pages you want, it is your responsibility to find out why. This is the first step in the right direction.
