Category: Web Analytics

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User behaviour or Search Engine behaviour

I have been away from blogging since last two or three months; thanks to my few hard taken decisions on deciding my career path. Well that is another point and I have decided to go freelancing and already working as a freelance professional for more than two months now. Staying away from blogging didn’t mean I am not watching over my blog. Couple of months back I wrote an article (of course technical one) about a hack to Integrate FCKEditor File Manager into the new CKEDitor. Very soon it became pretty popular and that article indeed generated good traffic on my site. There were many fellows like me who were in search of a similar solution and stumbled upon my article. Many sites linked back to me as well and almost daily there were 2-3 comments posted on that article. I could also see the number of page views in my google analytics dashboard rising higher. I believe the article helped many people and thought it would continue to remain popular unless any competitive solution is available on the Internet. However recently I have started seeing low responses to that article in the form of very less comments or no comments at all for weeks. This makes me think what has happened to the user behavior and their response to the article. To date there are around 107 comments in all for that article and it makes me sad that the article is no more fetching any more comments. Is there something wrong with my blog or just a change in user behavior? The search engine ranking using the most common keywords related that article puts me on the first page at least in google and I am sure there is no other competitive solution yet on the Internet. Also the number page views for that article pretty much appears to be same as it was initially, but for some reasons comments have stopped. What could be the reason?…

Any thoughts or comments? please post and of course I checked my blog’s comment box and its working 🙂

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Google Analytics Tracking Code Plugin for WordPress

Today I am excited to launch a small new plugin that embeds the Google Analytics Tracking Code inside your theme files dynamically without you needing to hard-code it in your template files.

This is pretty useful if you frequently change your WordPress Theme files, and now you don’t need to worry about leaving out your Google Analytics code accidently just because you switched to a new theme.

You can download the plugin from WordPress.

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Google Analytics: Tracking outbound links

Recently I was exploring Google Analytics to track website visits on my clients website. Google Analytics (GA) is indeed a powerful tool yet simple to use, implement, and most of the things are pretty straight forward. Even developers like me who are not from the SEO or Analytics background can setup website tracking pretty easily without much learning curve and can have a detailed analysis reports about the site usage, user patterns, etc.

Most of the things Google Analytics appears to do on its own without any efforts from our side to make it happen except (and off course) the GA java script code that we need to embed on each pages on our website. Again, this is pretty simple if your website is well designed and programmed (include files are good) so that from one location or file you can have the GA code added on every page automatically.

Once your GA code is in place Google starts tracking almost everything about your website usage and soon you get useful reports inside your website profile in Google Analytics. All pages, All clicks are tracked automatically (or say automagically). Such a powerful tool!

However I noticed that Google was not able to track the clicks on outbound links. Outbound links are those links on your website that take or redirect your users from your website (domain) to some other website (domain). Google does not seem to do that automatically and here it requires us to put a small javascript code inside such links. Here is the example taken from GA tutorials. (Its a nice place to explore and learn more about GA)


<a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.com');">

Notice the onClick event added inside the <a> tag. The href attribute contains the URL of the external website and the pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.com') contains the argument with which you want to tag your outbound link click as a page view. Once this is in place Google starts tracking clicks on your outbound links as well, and the top content reports would show the tag you have assigned (in above example: ‘/outgoing/example.com’) as a page view to external site. This will give you a useful information about how many users are clicking on such outbound links and taken to external websites. Also its wise to organize and tag such links in some logical directory structure so that you can distinguish from which outbound link and from which page your users are going to any external site.

This is just a brief description about it, you can learn more about this topic at GA Tutorials. The above code snippet is applicable to only the latest version of GA tracking code.