Following my previous post in this two-part serties, in my opinion there are 2 main limitations of Google Analytics:

1. No automatic tracking of file downloads and outbound links – this post…
2. No regionalisation of Search Engines for SEO - previous post

The first is an major limitation for Search Marketers requiring regional search engine detail for SEO campaigns; The second is a real pain in the bum for webmasters of content heavy websites who need to track non-standard click throughs (file downloads, mailto, outbound links).

However, Google Analytics is a very flexible product and a little bit of custom JavaScript can go a long way – so I have developed simple JavaScript “plugins” to over come these limitations…

Automatic Tracking of file Downloads and Outbound links

On a small scale, tracking file downloads and outbound links is straightforward for a webmaster. All that is required is a modification of the link anchor to include an onClick event handler – either to call a virtual pageview, or track as an event. That’s fine for a handful of download/outbound links, but what if your site contains hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of these…? This script automates this for you.

Add 1 line of code to your pages and this JavaScript extension will scan all your page links in the background – as the page is loaded by your visitors – and automatically adjust them accordingly.

Read more about automatic tracking of file downloads and outbound links >>

Summary of features:

• No manual modifications of your links required, just drop this script into your page header
• Auto-track File downloads – MS Office files (doc/x, xls/x, ppt/x), exe, zip, txt, pdf
• Auto-track mailto: links
• Auto-track outbound links i.e. those not local to yourdomain.com
• For each type (download, outbound, mailto), select if these are tracked as a virtual pageview or an event
• Multiple pageTracker support – works with multiple GA page tags.
• Improved bounce rate calculation – can optionally set a timeout to redefine a bounced visit e.g. set a single page visit a bounce, only if time on page is 30+ seconds

What it looks like

Without this script there is no outbound link or file download reporting by default. With this script you can view these as either virtual pageviews or events…

Using virtual pageviews for tracking file downloads and outbound links:

Using events for tracking file downloads and outbound links:

Find out more about this extension >>

Also read Part 1 of this series – regionalisation of Search Engines for SEO

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Google Analytics customisations you cannot live without #1
2. Track outbound links and file downloads automatically in Google Analytics
3. Tracking banners and other outgoing links – Automatically
4. Google Analytics ebook (PDF) available

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: auto, automate, automatic, doc, download, file downloads, mp3, outbound, outbound links, PDF, ppt, xls, zip

If you like tweaking Google Analytics for your specific needs, this 2-part series is for you… Essentially, in my opinion there are 2 main things that Google Analytics cannot do:

1. No regionalisation of Search Engines for SEO – this post
2. No automatic tracking of file downloads and outbound links - follow-up post

The first is an major limitation for Search Marketers requiring regional search engine detail for SEO campaigns; The second is a real pain in the bum for webmasters of content heavy websites who need to track non-standard click throughs (file downloads, mailto, outbound links).

However, Google Analytics is a very flexible product and a little bit of custom JavaScript can go a long way – so I have developed JavaScript “extensions” to over come these limitations…

SEO Search Engine Regionalisation

Regional differences are important – for example, if you are conducting SEO for a North American audience, knowing if visitors come to your site via a search on google.com, google.ca or google.co.mx can be very important to you. More so in Europe, which is a more fragmented market: google.co.uk, google.de, google.fr etc., and the same for the Middle East, Asia, Asia-Pacific and so on. Essentially, if your SEO is targeting different countries, understanding regional differences is a key requirement of your work.

Google Analytics tracks 40 search engines, in aggregate. That is, all google domains are tracked as a single entity – “google”. The same for Yahoo, Bing and all the search engines it tracks by default. So you don’t know if a visitor from a Google search came form google.com or google.co.uk – or any other google/yahoo/bing domain…

Customising the Search Engine Report

Although adding a new search engine is straightforward in GA, managing a large list is cumbersome. This JavaScript extension does all the hard work for you and is fully maintained and updated by me. Just add 1 line of code to your pages:

Find out more about this Extension >>

264 search domains tracked…! Summary of features:

• Tracks visitors from 189 regional Google domains – and their keywords
• Tracks visitors from 30 regional Yahoo domains – and their keywords
• Tracks visitors from Google Maps, News, and Video search – and their keywords
• Tracks visitors from 46 other search engines that are not available in GA: e.g. BBC, Tesco, Maktoob (Arabic), Naver (Korea), HotBot, zinza (Arabic), Rambler (Russian), ukr.net (Ukraine), others…
• Adds price comparison engines kelkoo.com, pricegrabber.com

NOTE: These are all in addition to the GA defaults (40 search domains). Check out the full list of tracked search engines and domains (growing all the time).

Sample report view before applying this extension:

Sample report view after applying this extension:

As you can see, there is a great deal more regional information when you deploy this script. Installation is straightforward.

Find out more about this Extension >>

Read part 2 of this series – automatic tracking of file downloads and outbound links

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Google Analytics – Customisations you cannot live without #2
2. SEO Tracking – Bing in Google Analytics (and other custom search engines)
3. SEO Tracking – regional Search Engines in Google Analytics
4. SEO Tracking – Customising the list of recognised search engines
5. Track outbound links and file downloads automatically in Google Analytics

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: auto-tracking, downloads, external links, files, hack, mailto, outbound, search engines

Google Analytics recognises 41 search engines by default. Although this is constantly being added to, there are of course a great many other search engines in the world – language and region specific, as well as price comparison and vertical portals.

This hack is for anyone who manages SEO at a regional level i.e to be able to differentiate regional variations of search engines. For example, the default Search Engine list for Google Analytics shows aggregate search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., this hack shows regional specific ones for your SEO efforts.

April 2011 – New async hack launched
This hack has been completely revised for the latest GA async code. Further info >>

[ Now 100+ additional SEs + GA defaults (140+ domains). You no longer need to re-define the default set of search engines as this hack now prepends new search engines to GA's list. For details on new prepend revision see: code.google.com ]

Sample list of regional search engines:

• Google.com
• Google.ca
• Google.com.au
• Google.co.uk
• MSN.co.uk
• MSN.fr
• eniro.se
• eniro.no
• maps.google.com (local search)
• etc.

It is straight forward to add to Google’s list of recognised search engines – you simply add your own as described in the following Help Centre article . However, the Help Centre article cannot customise the list – only add new search engines. That is, "google" as a whole has already been defined so adding google.co.uk to the list won’t work as – it’s too late.

This hack was written to enable you to do this (original 2007 post here ).

Some further background…

I discuss this hack in Chapter 9 of the book and show the script to do this. However recent changes in the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) has meant that the code no longer works written as it was.

Fortunately after some experimenting (a pseudonym for trial and error!), and help from Tomas Remortigue from Mountain View (all round nice guy and Google Analytics technical wiz), the hack is now fixed and back working

How to track regional search engines

From the book, this is a simple update with respect to the placement of code – the call to the custom_se-ga.js . You can host the script locally (get the file from my scripts directory and place it in /scripts on your web server), or simply link directly to my file as shown.

The JavaScript file first clears the default list of search engines in Google Analytics and then defines 100 regional specific ones. Below is the layout you need to use for GATC:

Schematically, change your standard GATC from:

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<script>
     // load the ga.js file
</script>
<script>
     // set account number
     // track pageview visit
</script>
</code>

to:

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<script>
     // load the ga.js file
</script>
<script>
     // set account number
</script>
<script src="http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/scripts/custom_se-ga.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script>
     // track pageview visit
</script>
</code>

Notice the bold line inserted between setting the GA account number and tracking the pageview.

So a full GATC will look as below (remember to replace the account number, beginning with "UA-" with your own):

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<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
	var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-1");
</script>
 
<strong><script src="http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/scripts/custom_se-ga.js" type="text/javascript"></script></strong>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
	pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
</code>

Note: The syntax of the GATC has to be exact for this to work. When in place, your Traffic Sources > Search Engine report will look something like the one below:

If you use this hack, I would be interested to hear want you think, so please add your comments below or provide a rating by clicking the stars.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. SEO Tracking – Bing in Google Analytics (and other custom search engines)
2. SEO Tracking – Customising the list of recognised search engines
3. Google Analytics customisations you cannot live without #1

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2009. | Permalink | 40 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cusomise, customize, local, regional, search engines

Designing a web site for a mobile audience with a 3 inch screen and potentially slower data connection is clearly very different from other users. Therefore studying this segment of visitors can have important implications for your web development.

Visits from older generations of Internet enabled mobile phones cannot be tracked by web analytics tools that use page tags – including Google Analytics – as they do not execute JavaScript or cookies. The traditional solution to this was to use a Log analyzer such as Urchin. However the lack of cookie and JavaScript support was precisely the reason so few people used their phone for web access. In many cases sites just failed to work, so tracking the few mobile visitors out there was never a priority – until now.

The newer generation of Smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) have driven the recent proliferation of web usage via mobile devices by supporting cookies and JavaScript. Therefore visitors accessing your site from a Smartphone can now be tracked – in the exact same way as a desktop or laptop user.

Mobile Web audience statistics

• Mobile web browsing as a proportion of total web browsing is currently very small at 0.72 percent, though growing. [NetMarketingShare via Econsultancy.com blog, March 2009]

• US Smartphone users spent an average of 4.6 hours per month on mobile Internet sites. [M:Metrics via Marketing Charts, May 2008]

• In the US, 63.2m people used their mobiles to find news and information in January 2009, more than double that of January 2008. [comScore, March 2009]

• Of 182 million people in China with Web-enabled mobile phones, 102 million (56 percent) use the devices to connect to the Web. [Netpop Research via Clickz, April 2009]

How to track mobile visitors

As stated, by default Smartphone mobile visitors are tracked just as any other visitor to your website – you don’t have to do anything! However, the caveat is that these are a relatively small proportion of traffic, so are be buried deep in your reports.

In order to bubble these up to the top, you need to create an advanced segment. (If this means nothing to you, take a look at the advanced segment article on the GA Help Centre). The Figure below shows how to create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to highlight your mobile visitors. It detects either the visitor’s operating system or browser type and matches it against a known lookup list. Just as for profile filters, it uses the regular expression pipe character “|” to separate multiple possible matches for the same metric or dimension.(...)
Read the rest of How to track mobile phone users with Google Analytics (230 words)

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2009. | Permalink | 20 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: advanced segment, advanced segments, filter, Google Analytics, mobile, smartphone, track, tracking

As you may have heard, bing.com is the new search engine from Microsoft. Although tracking bing.com visitors in Google Analytics will take place automatically, the caveat is, that at present it is reported as a standard referrer – as if a link from another website. That means it is not grouped with other search engines in your reports and no keyword information is available.

This update allows you to track Bing.com as a search engine in Google Analytics with visitor keyword detail.

April 2011 – New async hack launched
This hack has been completely revised for the latest GA async code. Further info >>

Background

Search still has a long way to go in helping people efficiently find information other than for product search, so reading the Bing press release certainly caught my attention. Also see my latest post tracking regional search engines.

Although Google will no doubt apply a bing.com fix in the near future, the “Tracking regional search engines” hack is a script that allows you to define your own specific list of search engines for Google Analytics. For example, by default, Google Analytics groups all Google organic searches a ‘google / organic’. But what if you wish to separate google.com versus google.co.uk versus google.cn and all the other country specific domains? This hack enables this and allows you to define other regional specific engines such as naver.com (Korea), Eniro.com (Sweden) etc. In fact, over 100 regional specific search engines are now included, and you can easily add your own (or ask me to add them here!).

The Bing hack for Google Analytics

Using the script is straight forward – simply call it in your GATC before the function call _trackPageview(). For example, a modified GATC is as follows:

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<script type="text/javascript">
   var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
	var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-1");
</script>
 
<script src="http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/scripts/custom_se-ga.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
	pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
</code>

Don’t forget to change to your account number (UA-123456-1). If you are using the legacy urchin.js GATC, refer to the corresponding script in the Hacks section of this site (Hack #2).

Your Traffic Sources > Search Engines report will then look something like this:

As always I appreciate your comments/feedback, or a quick rating by clicking on the stars.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. SEO Tracking – regional Search Engines in Google Analytics
2. SEO Tracking – Customising the list of recognised search engines
3. Google Analytics customisations you cannot live without #1
4. SEO and Analytics – part 1
5. SES, Milan – don’t chop off the head that feeds the tail

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2009. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bing, bing.com, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engines, seo