Measuring Success

If reading a physical book like mine is your thing, that is, rather than trawling through online documentation (that may or may not be correct) or using a ebook (great as a compliment but doesn’t beat the real thing), then here is your chance to win a signed copy of the second edition posted direct from me – it may be really valuable one day…! All you need to do in this social media experiment, is simply retweet this post *adding* the hashtag #ga-book and I will pick a winner on August 15th (four weeks form today). Note you must add the hashtag so I can track it…! Good luck.    

Lots of interesting discussion sparked by my last post on the new EU privacy law, so I thought it worth while to follow up and clarify a few points that were raised: The new EU law came into affect on 25th May and is applicable to all EU member countries – right now Its up to the individual member states to enforce the law in their countries As a website owner, you need to obey the law in the country/countries you operate from. So if you have an office in the UK and France, you need to comply with both UK and FR law – hopefully these will be very similar. Hosting your website in Barbados does not change this… The law is applicable to all websites – commercial and non-commercial. The reality is that no one (the regulatory bodies for each EU country) is ready yet and so more [...]

Following new EU laws aimed at protecting the privacy of online users, there has been much said about the death of web tracking as we know it. At present the wording of the law is stating that visitors to your website must explicitly consent to having cookies stored on their computers. As pretty much all web analytics tools reply on cookies for visitor tracking, there are clearly implications for anyone that uses these on their site…

There are 2 main things that Google Analytics cannot do:

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

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…