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:

1. Add the custom script onto your server, eg. /scripts/taglinks.js
2. 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: 2% [?]

Well I decided to blow the dust of the blog, it’s been a whole 2 weeks since I last posted, this is a lifetime in the online community. Well the reason I havent been blogging is that I’ve been busy attending events and trying to apply the knowledge I’ve learnt to the affiliate marketing/make money online world. The next couple of posts will be about what I picked up.

IxDA Industry Session at Irish HCI Conference – 17th-18th September 2009, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

So this was the first event I attended which was held over two days, I have to admit I really was only interested in attending a couple of sessions mainly the ones related to web analytics and search, and I have to say I defintiely was happy with the knowledge shared at the event.

Web Analytics

First up was Niamh Phelan from IQ content discussing how to use Google Analytics, decide on the correct kpi’s/metrics for your business, establish your goals and tweak your website accordingly. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find Niamh’s presentation online but I was able to find a presentation she did previously that shares a lot of the slides:

Ei Presentation on analytics

View more presentations from Lar Veale.

Niamh was great and very helpful, she even was able to give me some advice after the event. One of the areas I was interested in was cross domain tracking on multiple domains and how to implement it.

Why as an Affiliate should I care about Cross Domain tracking?

Most successful affiliates will agree that in order to become successful you must think about longevity. The best way to do this is as Fraser Edwards recommended is to build a brand. A good example of this in the industry would be Doug Scott’s carrentals.co.uk targeting multiple countries using multiple domains. Ok, so what has this got to do with Cross Domains? Well once you’ve established your brand in one country or index, just as we scale our ppc campaigns when we’ve found a successful model, we do the same with our websites based on the markets where there is a demand for the products for which we’re an affiliate i.e. .com (targeting U.S. market), .co.uk (targeting U.K. market). When we’ve established a couple of country specific sites it is useful to track them as one brand, especially if the sites are heavily interlinked.

How to Implement Cross Domain Tracking on Multiple Domains

Niamh was able to point me to the post on IQ’s blog which deals with cross domain tracking.

The scenario

A user searches Google for “cheap widgets”. Your site, www.CheapWidgets.com, appears top of the search results, so the user decides to click on the link to your site. While browsing around, they click a link that leads to your insightful widget blog which is located at blog.CheapWidgets.com.

With the default Google Analytics setup, www.CheapWidgets.com will be seen as a referrer to your blog subdomain and a new set of cookies will be generated for that user, losing sight of information such as the referring site (Google) and the keywords that they used to find you (”cheap widgets”).

Ideally, this information would be preserved across all subdomains and any relevant third party domains that you own.

The solution

Google Analytics does provide a solution for this, but it’s a bit cumbersome:

Step 1: Modify your tracking code to include a couple of extra functions (which is simple enough).
Step 2: Manually tag each link to one of your subdomains or third party domains with a JavaScript function (which is annoying).
Step 3: Remember to tag each link that points to any of your domains (which is a burden). This is something that could very easily be overlooked.

The real solution

Niamh and the guys at IQ have produced a script that will automate this process. It automatically tags links to a set of domains that you configure inside the script.

The first thing you need to do is update the tracking code across each of your domains and subdomains.
Updated tracking code

<script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxx-x"); // Replace with your own account number
    pageTracker._setDomainName(".yourdomain.com"); // Don't forget to update this
    pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
    pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The value of _setDomainName should be the root of the domain you’re installing the code on. So, the value for both blog.CheapWidgets.com and www.CheapWidgets.com would be

pageTracker._setDomainName(“.CheapWidgets.com”);

The next and final step is to download the script, update the domains that you would like to track and include it on your page.
Sample configuration

var domains_to_track =
[
'blog.yourdomain.com',
'wiki.yourdomain.com',
'*.someotherdomain.com'
];

Include the script with the following code (it must appear in the body, just before your tracking code):

<script src="/path/to/js/xdomain.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

Popularity: 4% [?]

This is a follow up to the post I created yesterday on using analytics. When optimising your site and analysing data it’s best to go after the quick wins in the short term while still having a strategy for your long term goals. The quick wins would be to optimise and link build for the keywords that your ranking on the 2nd page of google and receiving traffic.

The appeal of this technique is pretty obvious. If your receiving traffic already from the 2nd page of google, how much traffic would you receive if you ranked on the 1st page of Google? If you already rank in the Top 20 of Google for the keywords how much link building will be required to move into the Top 10 compared with optimising and link building for a new keyword?

So now we know the benefits, how do we track our 2nd page rankings?

Thanks to Will and the guys at Distilled, I’m going to show you how to set this tracking up in Google Analytics.

• Create a new Profile for the site

• Add a filter and apply it to the newly created profile

• Set the filter up as follows:

The text in the Field A –> Extract A box is (\?|&)(start)=([^&]*)

This is a regular expression which extracts the parameter called ’start’ from the referring URL. Google uses this to determine which page of results to display (page 2 is start=10, page 3 is start=20 etc. for anyone with the default settings of 10 search results / page)

Segmenting the data

Now when we go into the profile we have the above data but it’s not quite what we want, we need to segment the data just to capture the keywords from referred from Page 2 of Google. To this we do the following:

• Select Advanced Segments

• Click on the drop-down and add a new segment as shown below:

• Finally Apply this segment to the report

Popularity: 2% [?]

When relying on search engine optimisation for your affiliate sites it helps if you can understand, analyse and make decisions based on the data you have for your sites. Google Analytics is a fantastic package for presenting your data regarding traffic to your site but it doesn’t offer everything you need right out of the box. But don’t worry Google Analytics is totally customizable and allows you to create filters and use expressions to get the data you need.

Some of the most important metrics I believe required to monitor your SEO efforts would be the ability to monitor Keywords, Rankings and Landing Pages. This data can always be manipulated with “Links to your site” data from Webmaster Central to monitor effects of link building.

There have been a couple of solutions on how to do this on the internet. Yoast had a post on how to track what page of google traffic came from along with keywords. This was good but it was still a bit awkward to read, i.e. the ranking report displays page 1 results as unset, (page: ), page 2 results as (page: 10) or (page: 11). Damon Gudaitis wrote a post on how to use Yoasts technique but how to make it more presentable, i.e. Page 1, Page 2, etc.

Again this was better but not quite there, it wasn’t actually tracking the ranking position. But then Google modified it’s referrer string for search queries and this was spotted by Patrick Altoft who immediatley realised it was now possible to track ranking positions.

Expanding on Patricks information using an example from James Morell, I’m going to show you how to setup Analytics to track keyword, ranking and landing page:

• Create a new profile in Google Analytics, and call it something like ‘SERP result and landing page.’

• Hit ‘Edit’ and add a new filter. There will be four filters in total.

• The first filter is for Google Traffic only. Set it up as follows

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Include’ radio button
Select Campaign Source in the Filter Field dropdown
Type ‘google’ into the Filter Pattern
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

• Next, Create another filter called ’search term and rank filter’

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Campaign Term in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select Referral in the Field B -> Extract B box. Enter (\?|&)(cd)=([^&]*) in the text box
Select Custom Field 1 in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A1 | rank: $B3 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

• Create a filter called ‘landing page’ to search for the landing page people are getting to:

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Referral in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (\?|&)(url)=([^&]*) in the text box
Leave the Field B -> Extract B box empty.
Select Custom Field 2 in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A3 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

• Finally, merge the last two filters together with one called ‘keyword, rank and landing page.’

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Custom Field 1 in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select Custom Field 2 in the Field B -> Extract B box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select User Defined in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A1, LP: $B1 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

To get value out of this report, go to Traffic sources, Keywords and select User Defined Value in the Dimension drop down. This will give you something like this once it has run for a few days:

So try it for yourself and see if it helps in monitoring your SEO efforts!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Let me start off by stating that this is a new blog, it’s been up a little over a week. Since it’s a new blog which we havent actively promoted it yet so our traffic is quite low around about 20 uniques a day.

You can imagine my surprise last week when I logged into Google Analytics and seen that the sites traffic had jumped over 500% in one nite to 130 uniques.

Now this was all down to one post we put up on our blog last week about Facebook Personal URL’s becoming available.

So What Have I Learned from this?

Blogging about topical trends or events can have a huge influence over your traffic. So if there is an upcoming event for your niche, even if your not going to it, blog about it.

Let me know if you’ve had any similar situations on your blog in the comments.

Popularity: 1% [?]