A Few Google Tips

In my last post, I talked a little bit about QuickBase’s non-typical Google Analytics implementation. During my time spent investigating how to properly implement the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code) on our site, I learned a few nifty things that I thought I’d share.
Make Tracking Dynamic Url’s Pretty

If your site does something like append a session ID to a page url, your probably seeing clicks to the same page look like clicks to different urls with the data showing up in Google like:

/page.php?sessionid=A2DB4BHe554ERG5
/page.php?sessionid=RG4577H891HH677
/page.php?sessionid=345J10R5BM56TH5

In reality, you want visitor data for page.php rolled up into just “page.php” and you probably don’t want to see the sessionid (or whatever dynamic data you have appended to the url).

Fixing this is pretty easy. In your GATC, you’re probably making a call that looks like this:

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pageTracker._trackPageview();

If you use the default GATC, like in the example above, Google will look at whatever the url is and go with that. In other words, pages with dynamic data appended will continue to look like different urls.

The solution is a rather easy one:

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pageTracker._trackPageview("page.php");

That’s pretty much it. Just feed in the string you want Google to call this page. You can tell Google to call the page whatever you want, even if the page was actually called page.php!

You can read more on this here.
Track Outbound Link Clicks

Google can track any clicks on outbound links you may have on your site, even if that site doesn’t have the GATC installed. This may come in useful if you’re purposefully driving traffic to a third-party for whatever reason. Here’s how you do it:

First, you need to turn on the feature. To do this, you need to add _setAllowLinker(true) to the default GATC implementation like so:

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Once you’ve made that modification, you can add some javascript to your outbound link and start getting the click data.

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Notice that you can specify how you want the click data to look in Google. If you follow the methodology used in this example, all of your outbound links will look like they were clicked from a folder on your domain called “outgoing”. This makes finding outbound click data much easier if you’ve got a lot of them.

Here’s the Google support page on this topic.
Keep Your Data Private

In April, Google launched a new data sharing policy at around the same time they updated the GATC with several new features. If you’re like us, you want to keep your site data private. Here’s how to do it:

* Login to your Google Analytics Account and select the account you wish to modify from the drop-down in the upper right
* In the upper-left, click on “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings”
* Selected your desired Data Sharing Settings and hit “Save Changes”

Of course, you don’t have to keep your data completely locked down.

Here are the options:

Share with Google Products only - For example, you would allow this if you wanted to share analytics data with Adwords (for use with Google’s Conversion Optimizer perhaps)

Anonymously Share with Google products and the benchmarking service
With this option enabled, Google will remove any identifiable information from your analytics information and use it for benchmarking and to improve upon its existing products/services.

Do Not Share will disallow Google from using your analytics data internally and it will disallow you from using the data within other Google products and services.

Hope you find these tips useful!