Sean Walther's Blog

How To: Track File Downloads with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is what most people use nowadays for web traffic reports.  It is flexible, powerful and simple.

The problem with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t analyze web traffic reports, but generates data in real time.  In most cases, this isn’t a problem.  In fact, it is big feature.  The problem is what about files that do not parse javascript such as PDFs, ZIP files, or other non-HTML documents.

When a user clicks on a PDF from your site, you will never see that PDF in Google Analytics.

How to track File downloads with Google Analytics
It’s very easy.  As is most things with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics provides a method for tracking anything you want.  It’s called “_trackPageview”.  

You use it in javascript as “pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/map’);”.

How does this help us track file downloads?  Simply modify the link to the file asset to have an “onClick”:

[jscript]
Link to the file here:

Download somefile.pdf

[/jscript]

See how easy that was?

Hopefully you have a function used to print out those links, then you can modify it in one place (that’s what I did).

You should see results in Google Analytics under Top Content shortly.

Tags: Analytics, Google Analytics, how to, Javascript, track, tracking, Tutorial, web traffic, web traffic report

Analyzing Twitter Traffic

I’ve posted a few times on my experiment to see how much Twitter boosts my overall traffic.  In doing so I’ve noticed a lot of my traffic now comes from strange sources.  With the use of TinyURL, and some of the interfaces people use for twitter, traffic is difficult to watch.

An article I just read on Yoast, The analytics issue with Twitter offers a nice solution.  

According to Tweetstats.com, only 50% of twitter traffic comes from the web.  The other 50% comes from all sorts of various applications.

How do we track it?

One great way, suggested in the aforementione article, is to tag twitter posts with campaign tags.  Just like large companies do, tagging traffic as a campaign will let you analyze traffic coming form all Twitter sources.

Check out the original post, The analytics issue with Twitter.  He deserves credit on this, I’m just pointing you to his article.

Tags: Analytics, analyze, TinyURL, Traffic, Tweetstats, Twitter, Yoast

Got unused domain names? – Try Google Adsense for Domains

I never knew I could take some of my unused domains, and hand them over to Google (why do I even link “Google”?  Who doesn’t know where Google is?) to try and monetize some of the wasted traffic.

Looking through Google’s Adsense interface earlier this week I found a new option — Google Adsense for Domains.  

I’m not an advocate of parking domain names.  If you happen to have some extra domains sitting around it’s a great idea.  

The steps are simple:

1. Create an Adsense account - https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Purchase Domains (if you don’t already have them)
3. Setup the Domain for use with Adsense for Domains (there’s a guide at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100301&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link)
4. Add Unused Domains to Adsense
5. Modify domain registrar settings (setup a blank A record to the IP 216.239.32.21, and setup a CNAME “www” record pointing to pub-xxxxxxxxxxx.afd.ghs.google.com, where “xxxxxxxxxxx” is your provisioned Adsense ID)
6. Request Approval of the domain from Google (they are very helpful)
7. Configure some basic options (color, channel names, keywords if you want to hint the ads in a specific direction)
8. Profit

It is important to note that you can only do this with a domain that you don’t use for any other google hosting services (such as Sites, Apps, etc).

For me it’s been worth it.  I made $0.32 today that I wouldn’t have otherwise made.  

The best part is just to see how many people visit your defunct domains.  I love knowing how many people are just typing in a domain, or linking to it on accident.

I haven’t figured out how to run both this service, and Google Analytics.

Tags: AdSense, Adsense for Domains, Analytics, CNAME, Google, Parked Domain, registrar