Tracking Clicks with GA Pt. 1: About urchinTracker()

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Welcome to Part 1 of How to Track User Clicks using Google Analytics. Before we learn how to track clicks we need to review some of the technology behind Google Analytics. In particular, we need to understand how GA creates pageviews. Why? Because we will use the same technology to track clicks. This post may [...]

Tracking Clicks with Google Analytics Pt. 0

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Have you ever wondered what people click on when they get to your website? I don’t mean which links, I mean which elements. Do they get confused and think that an image is a link and try to click on it? Which outbound links do they click on? I know this may seem like a [...]

Google Analytics Configuration Mistake #3: Third Party Domains

One of Google Analytics’ great features is that it can track visitors across multiple domains. This is especially handy for all those folks using a third party shopping cart. Getting GA configured correctly to work with a third party domain is not overly complicated but there can be some issues. Here’s my list of the [...]

Google Analytics Configuration Mistake #2: Query String Variables

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In my previous post I discussed how an incorrect Default Page setting can cause a single page on your website to be counted as two different pages. That same concept is the driving force behind Common Google Analytics Configuration Mistake #2. If your website uses query string parameters you may be creating hundreds or thousands [...]

Google Analytics Configuration Mistake #1: Missing Default Page

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Setting the default page for your website is a simple configuration step that insures the quality of your Google Analytics report data is good. The default page for a website is the page shown to a visitor when they enter just the website domain into the browser’s location bar. If you type http://www.cutroni.com/ into your [...]

Count Me Out!

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To keep your Google Analytics data pure you should remove all traffic generated by yourself or others that may not be real visitors. For example, if your company has a large call center you should remove the traffic they generate because it will skew your analytics data. To remove this data we usually use an [...]

How Google Analytics Tracks Third-Party Domains

Time for another installment of how to set up Google Analytics the right way! Today we’re going to talk about how to configure GA if your website spans multiple domain names. This is often the case if you’re using a third party shopping card. Just a note, I’m not going to get into the actual [...]