This post is continuing on from yesterdays post. Another great tip from Niamh from IQ Content that will be of great benefit to Affiliate Marketers is the ability to track downloads and external links through Google Analytics. They have even gone to all the trouble of making it very easy for you by making a script that will automatically track all downloads.
This will track the following file types:
- PDF (.pdf)
- Microsoft Word (.doc)
- Microsoft Excel (.xls)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
- Microsoft Visio (.vsd)
- Microsoft Visio XML (.vxd)
- ZIP Archive(.zip)
- RAR Archive (.rar)
- Text file (.txt)
- Downloadable Javascript file (.js)
- Downloadable CSS file (.css)
- Executable (.exe)
- NEW Windows Media Audio (.wma)
- NEW Quicktime (.mov)
- NEW Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
- NEW Windows Media Video (.wmv)
- NEW Mpeg Layer-3 (.mp3)
How to use the Script:
- Add the custom script onto your server, eg. /scripts/taglinks.js
- Add an extra line of code to every page on your site, immediately before the ga.js GA tracking code
How to monitor downloads:
The script scans each page and autotags all downloads, mailtos and external links with ‘onclick events’. This means that every time a visitor clicks one of these links, a virtual page view is sent to GA.
The virtual page views appear in the ‘Top Content’ report in GA and they look like this:
Downloads: /virtual/download/page/file-name/
Mailtos: /virtual/mailto/page/email-address/
External links: /virtual/exlink/page/destination-url/
Each time one of these events takes place,
- the name of the downloaded file is logged,
- the email address to whom the email is sent is logged, and
- the destination of the link the visitor followed off your site is logged
Further, in all cases, GA logs the page from which the virtual page view was triggered. This is valuable data:
Consider a scenario where visitors have the option to download a newsletter from your home page or from your publications page. By measuring the page from which users launched the download, you have full visibility on which page generated more newsletter downloads. Note you may have more than one line entry in ‘Top Content’ for any given PDF. Each line item records each location where the file was downloaded.
How do I structure my account?
You can measure what you want to measure. Here’s how.
- If you want to isolate all of these virtual page views, simply type /virtual/ in the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of ‘Top Content’
- If you want to isolate just the downloads, type /virtual/downloads/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
- If you want to isolate just external links type /virtual/exlinks/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
- If you want to isolate just mailtos, type/virtual/mailtos/ into the ‘containing’ field at the bottom of the ‘Top Content’ report.
You get the gist.
For example, to isolate only the file downloads, type, /virtual/downloads/:
The third entry indicates that there were 39 downloads (pageviews) during 36 sessions (unique pageviews) of the file PM18012008.pdf, launched from the page http://www.iqcontent.com/about/jobs/ in the time period selected.
Popularity: 18% [?]
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