Need help setting up google analytics goals / tracking
-
I don't use Google analytics to see much more than how many visits I'm getting and what sort of keywords people are using to find our site. I'd like to step up my GA skills a bit. I'm wondring if you guys could give me some advice. I've never really set up any GA goals, or used it to track specific things, but I'd like to. Here are a few things off the top of my head that I would like to track. I'm wondring if these are posable in GA, and if someone could give me some feedback on how to track it / set up goals. Thanks.1
1. I'd like to know how many people click play on a video when they are on a page that has a video.
2. I'd like to know how many people are clicking "like" " google plus, etc.)
3. I'd like to know the path people are taking on our site. For instance, if they click a link from Facebook, and go to a landing page, what page are they visiting next.....
4. How long people are staying on the page
I would really like to break this down further by people that visit a link I posted on Facebook, or twitter, or from the link on my twitter profile page, etc...
Also if there are any other valuable goals / reports that would be useful for a blogger to track I'd appreciate your feedback.
Thanks.
-
4. How long people are staying on the page
This is a good post, which covers the basics of Google Analytics goal setup, but you basically want to set "duration" as the goal metric to track and then specify a minimum time you want to track.
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-setup-goals-in-google-analytics.html
If you have any further questions let me know.
-
Hello Noah's Dad,
Great question by the way and I hope this answer will assist you.
1. I'd like to know how many people click play on a video when they are on a page that has a video.
You can use Event Tracking to do this (see below), but you need to make sure you have set up tracking for your website. More information can be seen here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html
[Play](#)
I believe you can wrap the link around your video embed code and it will do the desired action of tracking people who played the video.
_2. I'd like to know how many people are clicking "like" " google plus, etc.) _
This one is a bit trickier. Most of the social media "like" or "+1" buttons are loaded / served up using iframes (for Facebook) or JavaScript for the others. Google provides its own markup tags to load their social media buttons in, and its all a bit of a dogs dinner quite frankly. There should really be a standard for the implementation of these buttons but anyway! You could try using a similar onClick function as shown above, but you would need some additional code in the footer of your site to attach the onClick event to each button after the page has been loaded. I'm not sure if there is an easier way to do this but if you need help with coding this up let me know. Equally if someone else here has a better method I would like to know too!
3. I'd like to know the path people are taking on our site. For instance, if they click a link from Facebook, and go to a landing page, what page are they visiting next
This is possible in Google Analytics. If your on your Google Dashboard for the domain, click Audience then click Visitors Flow, this provides a nice interface to view this information.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do we need to interlink homepage to the highest?
Hi, So our homepage is not even at top 5 pages interlinked most. I could see a ranking drop even when other pages overtaken homepage in internal linking. Homepage is the highest priority page we are expected to rank for our primary keyword. So, not linking homepage internally high but giving importance to other pages confuses Google and outrank homepage in rankings? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Why are there lots of 404s after setting up CDN?
I just setup Cloudfront CDN through W3 Total Cache. Everything looks good but there is one problem that I have encountered: After activating the CDN none of the images are available at the older image URLs and they are throwing a 404 error. Let me give you an example for this: 1. Before I setup the CDN, let's say an image was available at http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/leap-of-faith.jpg 2. After I setup the CDN, the image is available at http://cdn.example.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/leap-of-faith.jpg and the good part is the URLs in the blog posts where this image was attached is updated to reflect the above mentioned URL. But the problem is that when visit the older URL of the image (which is what Google has crawled earlier, I get a 404 error). Can you help me how to avoid this problem? Ravi C
Web Design | | stj0 -
How does Google look at strings added to a URL
For example: http://localhost:3000/en-US/app/a-knsmtrhqrqs/personal where knsmtrhqrqs is a string Can Google tell this is a string and what's their policy? Will it hurt rankings? Thank you.
Web Design | | RoxBrock0 -
Pleas Help! My microdata format disappeared?
Hi guys im new on this comunity, reacently i have an ishue taht i do not know how to solve. Google suggested that you can put microdata on my website and its look very cool on the organic search pages. So whtat happend. I have change my website to a new one with all rich snippets and microdata, submited a xml.sitiemap dinamic one that refresh every time when i putt something new on my website. do a redirection from my old site to a new one. All that google propose. I have check all the pages in webmaster tools and in a that tool google show everything, also microdata have shown on a google organic search aproximetly 7 days when he refresh my pages from old site. After that microdata and little stars just desapired from organic serch on google. I do not know why? I did not do anything. So can anyone help me how to return little stars on my links on google shown on organic serch. website: www.telekoplus.com hosted in Serbia Thank you in advance Beket Borocki P.S Sorry if i have mistakes in writing on English.
Web Design | | telekoplus0 -
Web Designer Needed
So I feel like I've almost convinced my boss to hire out a re-design for our website (which is SORELY needed.) I'm at the step where I need to start finding quotes and site builders. I want a responsive design site built modern and professional... Love the moz site but not responsive enough. My current favorite example is at www.hasoffers.com Does anybody have any suggestions of where to go? And as a bonus, if anybody is brave enough to ballpark what a site like this would cost that would be awesome. Doesn't have to be exact or even that close... Thanks for any advice given.
Web Design | | jesse-landry0 -
Website Updates, will this affect my ranking/ DA or PA?
Hello All! My website is due for a big update soon, my current site is doing ok, however I want to update all of the content, structure, style and look of my whole site. I feel that with the way it's been going lately that it's time for an upgrade, my question is, will this affect my ranking? Will my page ranking's be affected? Will my DA be affected? I intend to optimize this new website perfectly too with all the things I've learnt since joining this forum. All the best, Paul
Web Design | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Geo Targeting for a City / State - is it possible?
What are the best ways to geo-target for a specific city? (Please share your top 5 ways to do so)
Web Design | | HMCOE0 -
Hosting/design company that is both cheap and has a nice partner package. Any ideas?
I need to signon with a hosting/design company that is both cheap and has a nice partner package. Any ideas?
Web Design | | christinarule0