Sonicko Consulting

How To Use Google Analytics on Myspace

I received an interesting email from a reader last week about using Google Analytics on a Myspace profile. As most of you know Myspace does not allow for the addition of JavaScript into profiles, and up until now there has not been a solution to allow for this. Over the years I’ve received thousands of visitors looking for information about this, but I’ve never had a solid solution in which to offer up until now. Please note that this solution is for technically savvy users of Flash, but hopefully an easier solution can be built through a script or simply application. The reader proposed the following solution: 

Simply put since Myspace allows embedding flash objects.  You can create a flash file 1px by 1px with the same color background as your myspace page. Then you would call the javascript from the flash object as shown at (http://blog.projectx4.com/2008/03/28/google-analytics-flash-easy-peasy/).

 

// GOOGLE ANALYTICS SIMPLE TRACKING /// Script by: corban baxter   import flash.external.ExternalInterface;   function gaTracking(page) {         ExternalInterface.call(“pageTracker._trackPageview”, page); }   //end 

// CODE FOR SIMPLE CALL IS BELOW \\
gaTracking(“/flash/home”); //sends event to google’s analytics system

Please note that I have not verified that this is in fact a permanent solution, but a very clever idea to solve the issue of getting web analytics tracking beyond Myspace’s rudimentary ‘views’ tab. Please feel free to provide comments, and I’ll be sure to update this post as reader’s give it a shot. Through community and heopfully with some web developers with a few spare moments users of Myspace will be able to tag their profiles with Google Analytics.

Tags: Google Analytics, myspace, Web Analytics

My Google Analytics Wish List

Google Analytics is a very robust web analytics solution that Google provides for free, but there are several features that I would love to add to my wish list for consideration in future updates:

1. Ability to remove yourself from accounts. I have several old clients who still have me listed on their Google Analytics and have no way to remove myself. Being able to remove yourself from a Google Analytics account would be a great feature.
2. Ability to limit access to reports. Right now Google has two account levels (Administrator and User) which is fine, but I’d love to have the ability to gradually increase the amount of reports that users new to web analytics see. Even as a standard user Google Analytics can be overwhelming, and with subsequent training users could have access to more and more reports.
3. Create dashboards that encompass multiple sites. I’d love to have the ability to create a dashboard similar to what Omniture offers that is completely customizable, and offers the ability to create droplets from multiple sites within a single dashboard.
4. Show me whats changed. There are third party plug ins that allow you to see what keywords have changed, but it requires Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the plug in to work. Not exactly perfect integration. I would like to see this integrated along with information reporting on increasing and decreases across top content, referring sites, etc.
5. Simplify goal tracking. The difference between head, exact, and regular expression is not clearly defined in my opinion. Offer the ability to paste additional JavaScript onto your goal page similar to Adwords conversion tracking as an option to tracking conversions. Same thing could be applied to the funnel visualization as many CMS (content management system) solutions offer the ability to customize the page, but not the URL in question.
6. Standardize on exact keyword tracking. Currently if you use broad or phrase match in your search engine marketing campaigns the exact keyword is not passed into your web analytics. ROI Revolution has created a great script that places this under user-defined in the visitors section of Google Analytics, but this is not a standard feature.
7. Offer offline tracking integration. This one might be a stretch, but I’d love to be able to create a vanity URL through Google for my offline campaigns and then have it redirected and show up in referring sites. I do this normally through purchasing URLs and then 301 redirecting them myself, but for the majority of users this is probably a more advanced feature. Additionally using Voicestar or other solution for phone number tracking would be great.
8. Segment out paid vs. organic for other search engines. Right now you have to manually tag all of your destination URLs for Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask if you want them to be segmented out. There are ways to help automate this as I’ve previously blogged about, but still not a true automation. I’d love to see a way of specifying a key that could them automatically sort the campaigns as appropriate.
9. Improved site overlay. A plug in like what Omniture uses seems to work consistently better than what Google Analytics uses, especially for sites that use JavaScript, AJAX, and use of other non standard technologies.
10. Creation of custom variables for future expansion. Just as how ROI Revolution came out with the exact keyword tracking I would love to have future expansion of custom variables that can be utilized.

What other features would you love for Google Analytics to include in future releases?

Tags: Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst, Web Analytics

How To Tag Yahoo Search Marketing Campaigns for Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust free web analytics application and provides integration with Google Adwords that allows for automatic importing of your Adwords account performance into Google Analytics. That’s great, but what about for Yahoo Search Marketing? Google and Yahoo account for roughly 90% of search engine market share, and most people in SEM run Search Marketing in conjunction with Adwords. In the past it was possible to manually tag all of your destination URLs by keyword, but it was a time consuming task. What you can do though is to add the following query string at the end of your destination URL:

?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc%20&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

This will automatically insert the keyword, ad group, and campaign into Google Analytics along with the source of yahoo and medium of cpc. This should match up what you have with Google Adwords with the exception of cost and keyword position data that is not directly brought in. Copying and pasting this onto your destination URLs can easily be done through excel and then uploaded directly to your Yahoo Search Marketing account. If you need help just ask your Yahoo rep who can initiate a bulk upload of your excel export. I’ll be writing up a similar post for Microsoft adCenter shortly.

Tags: Google Analytics, Yahoo Search Marketing

Why Google Isn’t Enterprise Level

As I was in a client’s portfolio today inside Google Analytics I was trying to export a dashboard as a PDF, but would consistently get the following error message upon either export or trying to send the dashboard via email:

After playing around with it I was able to export as XML. I suspect the problem may be due to the fact that this particular dashboard had Google Adwords data in it, as other reports and profiles exported just fine, but so far it is just a theory. After exhausting all of my troubleshooting methods (PC vs. Mac, Firefox vs. IE vs. Safari) I opened up a ticket with Google Analytics support. As Google Analytics is a free solution they only currently offer email support, although they do have Google Analytics Authorized Consultants as well as Google Analytics Groups if you have an issue, but in this case I believe it is with Google themselves and not something I’ve defined.

I go to open my ticket and it goes through without issue. Fast forward 15 minutes when I go to check my email in Entourage. It comes up with an error that it cannot connect and that there is an error with my account. Colleagues email is working fine so I give it some time. Fast forward again over 12 hours later and my work email is still down. Upon logging into Google Apps our IT administrator is greeted with a message that there are problems with Gmail and Google is actively working on fixing the issue. Upon logging in to web mail I’m greeted with the following:

So now I’m stuck in a situation where I emailed Google Analytics for support on an error message but I’m unable to see any communication because Google Apps and Gmail is not currently functioning either. Now not every company can afford to house a Blackberry Exchange Server or Microsoft Exchange 2007 which I understand, but I’m not the first, second, or even third to point out the pitfalls of relying upon Google to essentially manage day to day business operations. Similarly on the web analytics front there are plenty of free alternatives out there to Google Analytics, but not everyone has the need or can shoulder the expense of deploying Omniture Site Catalyst or Coremetrics.

My point being that while Google offers solutions that are geared towards the small and medium business market their products are simply not up to the caliber of being termed Enterprise level when you have over 12 hours of downtime to fix email, and when you’re unable to export a report in Google Analytics as a PDF for days without getting error messages. Has anyone else had similiar issues with other Google based apps?

Tags: gmail, Google Analytics, google apps