online-ethics/search engine marketing

here's my list of the things you really should be doing to get the most out of GA.

1. Tracking clicks on links. Every time you put a link to anything external or a download on a page, make sure you add onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/link/linkname'); ". Always know where your visitors went.
2. Tracking user groups. If you're sending people to a landing page, and you want to know where they go from there, segment them by using onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('Segment/Subgroup');". This will help you know what different groups are doing, and split-test user behaviour.
3. Tracking full referred URLs. You'll often get visits from forums or blogs that append their URLs. That's not much use to you, so to make sure you know where people actually came from, set up a filter with the following settings:
* Name: Full Referrers
* Type: Custom filter - Advanced
* Field A -> Extract A: Referral > (.*)
* Field B -> Extract B: -
* Output To -> Constructor: User-defined > $A$1
4. Exclude internal visits. Add a new filter, with the "Exclude all traffic from an IP address" setting. Then add your own IP address, and repeat for any other IPs you don't want to be included. Make sure you escape any full stops, with a forward slash, like this: 63\.212\.171\.
5. Tracking across multiple domains/subdomains. If you're running a very large site, or a site that spans multiple domains, you'll need to be able to track visits across those sites. Fortunately, we have a way of doing that. Firstly, we set up the following filter:
* Name: Full URI
* Type: Custom filter - Advanced
* Field A -> Extract A: Hostname > (.*)
* Field B -> Extract B: Request URI > (.*)
* Output To -> Constructor: Request URI > /$A1$B1

Now you'll see URLs in your content reports that look like this: example.com [example.com] , help.example.com/more.html and so on. Next, we tweak the analytics code slightly, so it looks like this:





That will make the code work across all our (sub)domains. Finally, whenever you link from one domain to the other, make sure that you stick this piece of code into the link: onclick="pageTracker._link(this.href); return false;". Alternatively, if you're using forms to jump between domains, use this code instead: onSubmit="javascript:pageTracker._linkByPost(this)".
6. Tracking ecommerce transactions. Yes, Google Analytics has a full ecommerce module built in too. To turn it on, go to the account settings, and change the Ecommerce Website button from No to Yes. Now, on your receipt page, add the following code, with the fields below being filled from the order.