All the Ways To Track A Website

This post is all about Google Analytics, so first off, you’ll need to know how to set up Google Analytics and basic Google Analytics terminology.

Goals

This is one of the most frequently used areas in Analytics, if you don’t use it already , you’ll want to find out how to set up goals.

Virtual pageviews

By using virtual pageviews you will be able to track links to things that are not in the right format to be a proper page, for example PDFs. This is explained in my post about tracking clicks on external links, which also discusses event tracking.

Call tracking

This is a great new technology that enables phone calls to be tracked down to what keyword was typed in which search engine. It also contains other very useful data about the caller and their interaction with your site. We reviewed our call tracking service and find it very useful.

Ecommerce tracking

When you sell anything on your site it’s great to know all the statistics for this and how it all matches up to your traffic sources and website interaction. Google have a helpful guide on setting this up.

Internal search

If you have a search function on your site, do you know what people are searching for? Finding out about the interaction with your internal search is very insightful at times!

Event tracking

One of my favourite things in Google Analytics, you can set anything as an event and track clicks, video interaction, mouse-overs – the possibilities are endless! Here’s how to set them up for tracking clicks on links.

Heat map

Heat maps are great for seeing where people are clicking, it’s a visual representation that makes it easy to make decisions on the layout of your site.

Custom Variables

This is a wonderful, if slightly advanced, method of tracking all those extra things you can’t do without customisations. With these you can track logged in members versus not logged in, or males versus females, or visits by section of the site, or many other things you might not even have thought of!

Cross domain

Tracking across different domains is sometimes essential as cookies are only applicable on one domain at a time. To pass on visitor information to another domain of yours you need to set up the tracking to take the cookie data across on links to your other domain. This is particularly useful if your conversions take place on a different domain.

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