Timeshifting Interactive Blog
Google Analytics: Separate tracking for RSS, email newsletters and mobile visitors
Google Analytics is great for assessing people’s interaction with your site, the fact that it’s a free tool is even better. Probably the most interesting/useful metric that it exposes is where people come from, both the physical sense with Google’s excellent geo-location and also on the web. In the case of the latter, it’s possible to break this down even further if you have a blog or send email newsletters by tagging your urls.
Analytics tagging is adding a couple of additional parameters to your urls that are picked up by the GA tracking code. These then show as additional sources/campaigns in Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.
These are most useful for email newsletter tracking to help gauge how effective your marketing has been. Answering questions like did the copy in the newsletter engage people to click through, of those how many bought something or signed up for your service? Try putting different copy/design into some A/B testing to gain some insight into how well your layout or copywriting is working.
I also like to tag my RSS feeds so I can whether someone visited the site directly or from a feed reader—good to know how many regular readers you here. I believe you can also do something similar with feedburner, but adding the tags directly in your blog software guarantees everyone will be coming in via a tagged feed.
The tagging syntax is as follows:
(note that lines have been wrapped for readiblity and spaces in your tags should be replaced with the ‘+’ character)
http://www.example.com/? utm_source=Email+Newsletter& utm_medium=email& utm_campaign=Newsletter+December+2009
- utm_source
This is the traffic source as you’d like it to appear in Google Analytics, examples are: ‘Email Newletter’, ‘Email Special Offers’, ‘RSS Feed’. - utm_medium
This is the medium type, examples are: ‘referral’, ‘email’, ‘feed’, ‘rss’. - utm_campaign
This is the name of the campaign, more useful for email tagging than it is for feeds, and would normally match the campaign’s name in your email marketing software. For blogs I just use the name of the site’s blog feed, e.g. ‘Timeshifting Interactive Blog’.
For email campaigns you would just append the tagging query string to your urls. Some software like Campaign Monitor can do this automatically, saving you monkeying around with the code. In the case of your blog’s RSS feed, there’s most likely an automatic solution as well. If you use WordPress, try the free RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics plugin—edit the source code to customise the source/medium tags that it appends.
One of the downsides of Google Analytics is its tracking is done with JavaScript. In cases where JavaScript is disabled or not available, no tracking data or visits are recorded. This is also a problem for the increasing number of websites using a native iPhone App for their mobile site. Sure you could write some kind of custom analytics for your site’s mobile edition, but then your analytics data would be split between two apps.
Google has recently solved these issues with the introduction Mobile Tracking. This SDK allows you to trigger tracking events server-side or from within native applications, removing the disjointed data issue and allowing you to profile all your visitors in one place.