Learning how to install Google Analytics is easy for most site owners. It will involve getting an account with Google, and then knowing how to place some code on your website or blog. Before you install Google Analytics, you should be aware of a couple of things:
1. Google Analytics tracks visitors on your site, what they’re clicking on, and how they are interacting with your site. While all of the data is anonymous, you might want to include a blurb in your Privacy Policy page that you are tracking visitors, or cookie-ing them for other things. Read the rest of this entry »
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This is a short post on how you can see the full referring url in one report in Google Analytics (GA).
The problem:
Just a quick background for people who haven’t run into this issue yet.
If you want to segment by source in GA; the referring url is cut at the domain. Which means if you got a referral from http://news.ycombinator.com/a-great-post/ you would see it in the source as http://news.ycombinator.com/. And if you have multiple urls from the same domain we cannot see which page it come from because it will be truncated at the domain.
The solution:
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You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?” Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that. In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”
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This is an instructional post for advanced use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to uncover insights about organic keywords driving traffic to your website. It’s a bit long, but bear with me – the results will be valuable to you 
If you’ve been using Google Analytics, then you might be familiar with all of the new changes in the past year, like asynchronous code, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and much more. Equally, Google has been making quite a few upgrades to Webmaster Tools as well. They now show you things like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, links to your site, and now search queries.
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We’ve been using the heck out of the annotation feature in Google Analytics, and here’s why: because we can correlate traffic to activity.
For the most part, it’s going to be your marketing activities. But it could be things like you were on vacation from date A to date B, and maybe that’s why your traffic went down. Or maybe your server was down on Friday morning, and that’s why your traffic came to a screeching halt.
I’ve also been annotating when we send emails out to our user base as well, even though MailChimp does a good job of tying into Google Analytics – I’d rather just roll over the note on the graph, rather than have to pinpoint the date range, and then go and look at the Visitor Sources.
To add a note, simply roll over the date you wish to add a note to, and then click the “Create new annotation.” It’s quite simple. Other folks who have access to your account can also add notes, and it will track who said what. While it does allow you to add multiple notes on a single date, it does not allow you to create a note over a date range. Bummer. That would be useful if for instance you did a direct mail drop over a 3 or 4 day period, right? Maybe they’ll add that later, but for now you just have to hack it by putting a note for “direct mail start” and another note for “direct mail end” or something like that.
Either way, it’s a pretty cool feature, if I do say so myself.
