What do you do if you want to track how often a link on your site is clicked? How do you see those links in Google Analytics (GA)? What filters and profiles should you create to accurately track this information? Hopefully, I can accurately answer these questions—some of them in this post, some in the future. *Warning* if you don’t care about web analytics, reading this post may produce seizures and a strong desire to fall asleep on the job.

First, why in the world would you want to track internal links? Isn’t that stupid idea?

• If I click the "go here now" link on my site, and it takes me to another page on my site ( www.example/go_here_now.html ), why do I need to track the link? Wouldn’t I just check the navigation path report for /go_here_now.html? Yes, you could do that. But what if you have multiple links on Page 1 that link to Page 2? How do you know what links brought someone from Page 1 to Page 2? Was it the blue link? Or the green button? The navigation path simply tells you what page people came from and to, it doesn’t tell you exactly how they got from page to page

Second, which method of link tagging should you use? _trackPageview or utm? 

Continue reading "How To Track Internal Links in Google Analytics"

Just a few days after launching Google Website Trends, Google revealed the real purpose of all that nice new data: Google Ad Planner. Launching just yesterday, it is "a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers." In plain English, Ad Planner enables you to find websites for placing your ads based on behavioral ad targeting and demographics. Figuring out where all that data is coming from has people—including me—scratching our heads. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

How does this thing work? Well, it’s still in private beta, but from what I can gather, you give Ad Planner the demographics or favorite web sites of your target audience and, according to Google, the tool will…

...return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

This also sheds some light on how Google is planning on integrating with the recently acquired Double Click.

Continue reading "Does Google Ad Planner = Privacy Concerns?"

I recently posted about Facebook’s new chat feature and white paper, and while I debated writing yet another Facebook post, this new feature is just too good to pass up.

Social media platforms are beginning to realize the need for statistical validation. In other words, people need to see some numbers to back up the buzz. Awhile ago, I mentioned YouTube Analytics. Now, Facebook brings you the Facebook Lexicon. Facebook Lexicon allows you to search for keywords that have been posted on Walls--be it a profile, group or page Wall. The details of exactly how it measure’s can be found here; but suffice it to say that it missed the mark.

Continue reading "Hey Facebook Lexicon, Track This: Disappointment"

In my nerddom, I recently discovered a Greasemonkey script for Google Analytics that is really, really cool. The folks over at Juice Analytics built this clever little snippet that allows for some advanced Google Analytics segmentation.

I recommend just reading Juice’s post on this. But, in summation it basically shows you the last three days worth of new referral links, plus any referrals in the last three days that have increased or decreased by 50%. It does the same thing for your keyword report. And...does all this with the click of a button. It’s really pretty amazing.

One of the reasons I love working at Viget, is because we really are a one-stop web shop. In other words, when I have a design or development question, I have some really incredible people just steps away that can answer my questions. Trace, being the smart chap that he is decided to ask Ben if we could take this script and tweak it a bit to work for the Network Locations report. Because Ben is a genius, it took him about 60 seconds and we now have another really great script...and you can download it if you like.

Continue reading "Sweet Greasemonkey Script for Google Analytics"

For social media marketers, one of the challenges has always been metrics. How do you measure success? While we at Viget have a secret sauce of our own for such things; the social media industry is still not as data driven as some would like.

Recognizing this criticism of social media and all things viral, YouTube has just unveiled YouTube Insight.

In their own words:

Finally, we have some answers. Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

In the same way Feedburner’s internal analytics have made it an invaluable for anyone with an RSS feed and essentially crushed the competition; YouTube Insight will further distance YouTube from their online video competitors.

Check out a screenshot of the interface.

Well done YouTube. Well done Google Analytics.