4 things you should track on your blog or website
If you are serious about your website or blog, you should definitly take the analytics part seriously. In this post I explain how to track some events on your pages to help you improve the website. These examples are targetting mostly WordPress and Google Analytics users, but most analytics tools should be able to perform these actions (if they don’t you should think about changing).
1. Site search
By tracking the searches on your website, you will know a little more about what’s on your visitors’ mind. You can check if they found some interesting results or if the information they were looking for was missing. There is many ways to track this, here are two:
Track site search with a WordPress plugin
If you have a Search box on your blog, Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for and whether they are finding what they are looking for. The plugin is great, but if you already have many plugins on your website I wouldn’t recommend installing one more. Get the plugin here.
Track site search with Google Analytics
Tracking what people are searching on your website is fairly easy with Google Analytics, to do so you should go to your website profile, then edit your Main Website profile information. You can then add the query parameter (usually “s” for WordPress blogs).
2. Track your new RSS feed subscribers
If you want to get more feed subscribers, one good thing would be to have data about which visitors are more likely to subscribe. Knowing that helps you to chose how to focus your efforts to attract such visitors. This technique is not perfect because only tracks clicks to the feed, you can not be sure that people have subscribed. At least you will know who shows interest for the subscription.
How to track your feed subscribers
To track your new subscribers, you should start by setting a goal in Google Analytics, to do this you should go in your website’s Profile Settings, then add a goal and set it as in the following image. The goal url doesn’t have to be an existing one.
To set the goal in your template, you should then add the goal in your WordPress theme. You can do so by adding this code (check the Google Analytics help though, you may not be using the same version than I do).
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DailyDesignerNews" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/rss/subscription');" />
3. Track document downloads
If you take the time and effort to create textures for download, vectors or an e-book, why wouldn’t you want to know how many people download it. To track these downloads, there is many solutions, following are two.
Use the WordPress Download Monitor plugin
This is the solution I chose, it makes adding new tracked download from a WordPress post very easy. The only missing capability to this plugin is that it doesn’t track the referrer for the downloads. Get the plugin here.
Track downloads with Google Analytics
Tracking downloads with Google Analytics works the same way as tracking RSS subscribers. Just set a goal for tracking links and add it to your file’s link like suggested in point number 2 above. For more advanced users and better productivity, you may want to have a look at how to automatically track file downloads in Google Analytics.
4. Track your WordPress comments with Google Analytics
Again, you will have for that to create a goal in your website’s profile.
Then, in the comments.php file in your template, you’ll need to find the submit button and to add the onclick javascript piece in it as follows.
<input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="<?php echo attribute_escape(__('Submit Comment')); ?>" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/submit/comment');" />
Great article. I posted a link to this page on my daily design blog: http://designthoughtfortheday.blogspot.com/
Ted
Good tips. You might want to update the examples though as urchinTracker is the old way of doing Google Analytics.
It’s far better to use the newer ga.js which has more features.
e.g.
onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker (‘/submit/comment’);”
could be replaced with
onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/submit/comment’);”
or using events
onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackEvent(‘comment’,'submit’);”
Thanks….I really love this post….very informative. I’m marking this as my FAVORITE
Gute Tipps, konnte einiges für meinen Blog benutzen
In my opinion the (forms) onsubmit event would be the better choice for Tip #4. This way the tracker gets called even when the Form gets submitted via the Enter key.
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Great advice. I certainly think its valuable to know all you can about your websites traffic and to see what people are searching for and how they come across your website.
I guess, if you are using feedburner, then you might not need to set a goal in analytics to track your new RSS feed subscribers. However, I am not sure about this. I am confused with the “goal url”. What will be the goal url for feedburner feeds?
Similarly for comments, what will be the goal url?
Oops! I did not see the javascript carefully for the goals. Please remove my above comment!
Thanks David Simpson for the tips. Just a question for him to clear my confusion.
Does pageTracker._trackEvent do the similar work as pageTracker._trackPageview? Can I use pageTracker._trackEvent(‘subscription’, ‘rss’) instead of pageTracker._trackPageview(‘rss/subscription’)?
thanks for the tips… useful info.
Great Post! I thingmo web design is complete if it doesn’t have clear naviation, readability of text and forms to contact
Great post. Thank you for the advice.
I was doing all of these already however I never knew that Google analytics was powerful enough to handle it for me. Great stuff!
Search Student Notes
After looking and trying several analytics packages I have been very impressed with the ease of tracking search, location, downloads, pages, clicks and goals with getclicky.com
Gute Tipps, konnte einiges für meinen
@DebiprasadYou can use either of these:
pageTracker._trackEvent(’subscription’, ‘rss’) pageTracker._trackPageview(’/rss/subscription’)?
…but pageTracker._trackEvent(’subscription’, ‘rss’) is the more correct usage as you probably do not have at /rss/subscription.
You are really tracking the subscription event, so it’s probably best to use that in the long run.
Tracking an RSS subscription will be hard as there’s no analytics snippet on the feed page – It’s XML format and expecting XML output. The analytics snippet requires extra markup. There’s no code generating a page landing on the subscription page.
Best way is probably to track events (such as clicking on the RSS feed button). Or use an onclick to fire track a page view attached to a goal (in effect, faking a page view to fire a goal).
This may be a little picky but the titles should read 4 ‘MORE’ things you should track, as tracking visitors and the way people find your site is naturally the first step (first stage of Google analytics).
I regularly post ways people use and find my site on my blog, as it helps my reades understand how you can optimis you blog to your particular audience.
There is a lot to be learnt from tracking, but it’s important to act on it, not simply to track.