Google analytics

[Rick Maday]

Is the analytic code added to each page automatically? If not how do we edit the html to add this.
Thanks,
Rick

[Dominic Maricic]

Hi Rick,

Actually our hosting has it's own logging built in which you can see by clicking on logs on your menu. If you want to use google analytics you can do that too! Sign up with google analytics first and they will give you a piece of code to add to your site.

Then go to Blocks on your site and click Add Blocks. Call it Google Analytics, click on the Source button in the editor and paste the code that they gave you. Then save the block.

Now back on the main Blocks page go down to your Google Analytics block and click the drop down box next to it to put it into the Footer region. It could really go into any position as it's invisible to the user but it's best in the Footer as it will load last and therefore not slow down the content on the page.

[Dominic Maricic]

Here's a bit more on Google Analytics and why to use it on top of our default statistics.

A few of you have asked me about how to track what's going on with your site. How do you figure out which of your marketing tactics are working. Here's a good way.

Google Analytics is a FREE service that google offers. By inserting a small bit of code onto each page (create a Block to put the code in to) Google will tell you everything you need to know. If you are using Google Adwords then it will even integrate stats with your ads.
To get started with Google Analytics go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an account.

Adding it to your site is IDENTICAL to the tutorial on how to add the NACHI call now button, but you're using Google code instead. Add it to a block in your footer. This tutorial is in the first web design board.


Here are some of the top things Google Analytics can tell you.
1. How your users got to your site. Did they click on a link on somebody elses sites, did they come from a search engine, did they type in your site address directly into the url. How many came from the NACHI site, how many came from another inspector who links to your site.

2. If they used a search engine, which one they used as well as what keywords they typed in to get to your site.

3. Where are your users coming from geographically. It can break down your users on a map and show how many visitors came from each state, and often where in the state they came from.

4. What page on your website visitors land on when they get to your site.

5. What page visitors leave your site on, this is useful to figure out what pages may need to be redesigned as they are scaring away potential clients.

6. What is the bounce rate of pages on your site. A 'bounce' occurs when a visitor enters the site on a page and immediately leaves without going anyhere else. A high bounce rate on your home page means you have some work to do!

7. The average time users spent on your entire site, and on each page.

8. How many visitors are visiting for the first time, how many are returning. This is helpful to see if your site is causing people to come back for a second look.

9. A Map Overlay of your website which displays your actual site with statistics about each link you have on it, showing you whats clicked on, when, and how often.

10. You can setup goals on your site and have them tracked. For example I have a goal that a visitor downloads a trial of our software, you might track someone visiting the contact us page, or submitting an inspection request via a form.

11. A Navigation summary that shows you the paths that are taken through your site. Once a visitor hits the home page, what link they click on next, then where they go from there. This helps to show the flow of your site.

12. If you have Google Adwords then you can filter all the above based on what ad was selected to cause the visitor to join the site.

13. and a whole bunch more...

Signing up for Google Analytics will take you about 5 minutes. They will give you 2-3 lines of code (javascript) that you should put on the bottom of EVERY one of your pages. Stats will start showing up within hours.

Every piece of information I listed above can be shown in multiple ways including graphs and stats. You can filter by geographic location, you look at info for every page on the site (maybe no one stays on a certain page for more than 5 seconds, junk it). You can view over date ranges. Maybe you put an ad in a magazine last week so you only want to look at the data during the time that ad was out. You can compare that to the previous week or even the last time you put out an ad.

Best of all, it's all free!!! Why? Because Google hopes you'll like the service so much that you'll use Google Ads. But of course you don't have to. The information you get is still priceless. There is nothing better than looking at the trends of your site, seeing how site traffic is steadily increasing and bringing you more business.

I hope this is helpful!!

[Rick Maday]

Signing up for Google Analytics will take you about 5 minutes. They will give you 2-3 lines of code (javascript) that you should put on the bottom of EVERY one of your pages. Stats will start showing up within hours.

If you create a "block" for the code it should take 2 min 15 seconds!

[Dominic Maricic]

Exactly, it doesn't take long at all to set up and the results from google are awesome!

[Jay Markanich]

Okay - I added the Google Analytics script at the bottom of the source code for every page in my site.  Didn't take long.  If this is NOT correct let me know and I will get back into it tonight.  Dom, you can check it to see if correct...  Very busy today, but will check in tonight after all my church stuff.  Thanks, Rick, for the tip and to Dom for letting me know how to do it.  Hope it's right!

[Dominic Maricic]

Hey Jay,

You did way too much work! All you need to do is create a block. Add the code to the block and set it to appear in the footer. Then it automatically appears at the bottom of every page of your site. Sorry if the instructions above weren't clear enough, I'll edit them now to make sure they are.

[Jay Markanich]

I usually do way too much work, but hopefully with results...  if I should remove that code from the scripts of each page let me know and then I will re-do it with the block method.  If I do the block method, should something physically appear at the bottom of each page?  Hey Rick, did you get my logo ideas and what was the outcome?  I really liked the combination of 1 and 2, but would love to see what you decided on!

[Dominic Maricic]

If you do the block method, nothing will appear, nor would it if you run it manually. Google Analytics doesn't have a physical presence like some counters.

Yeah, I didn't hear back from Rick either, nor did I see a new logo on his site

[Jay Markanich]

But the question remains - is it okay the way I did it?  Willo it worko?

[Dominic Maricic]

Yes it will. But if you add more pages you will have to remember to add it to the bottom of those as well.

[Julian Benton]

I've put the code on my site and find it very interesting.  One thing I notice though was that I have not had any crawling by the search engines.  Is there some way to facilitate this?

[Dominic Maricic]

Lots of link swapping. With new domains it can take a few months before they start crawling your site. The more you trade links though, the more often they will scan your site.

[Jay Markanich]

What is crawling?  How do I recognize it?  Is it good or bad?

[Dominic Maricic]

Crawling is what it's called when the "Spiders" (computer program) from the search engines traverse your site looking at all the pages on your site. Definitely a good thing

[Daren Koniuk]

Hi Dominic,
I added the block as you mentioned for google analytics and I still get a message on their site saying tracking not installed. Any idea why?

[Dominic Maricic]

Hey Daren,

Whenever you are adding straight code, whether html or javascript to a site page or block, you have to click on the Source button first and then paste it. You pasted it directly into the body so it was treated like normal text. You also had it placed in the footer region which actually doesn't exist on the theme you're using (you see a yellow block with the name of each available region when you click on blocks).

I've fixed it for you, so browse around your site a bit and check Google Analytics in an hour or two.

[Daren Koniuk]

Thank you for the fix. I had placed it as text on the bottoms of all the pages before I saw the posting. Then I took all that out and created the block for the footer, having no idea that my template has none. And I tries over and over to get it into the Source area, It kept giving me the same spot to place the text so I thought I was doing it right. Oh well.

Thanks again.

[Dominic Maricic]

No problem. The only reason I didn't remove footer as a possibility in the drop down box for that theme is in case your switching themes around it helps with continuity.

[Jay Markanich]

As to Google Analytics - I looked up the site to check on further information and there is a post as to "old" analytics code and "new."  The source code wording is quite different.  It suggests that we replace the old with the new.  So I did.

The "old" was working fine, and I was getting a lot of information.  I notice that much of my traffic views are from Home Inspector Pro members and that they are visiting one page and leaving - my bounce rate is 52%.  No problem there - just a note to say that I think the analytics is working!

However, my questions are these: 

First, when I saw the new source code, which looks like this:

<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-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

I simply deleted the "old", much smaller, code and replaced it with this one above.  Is that okay to do?

Second question is this:  Google says to put the script above into the source code right before the <body> (their symbol usage) and I could not find that word any where in my source coding for any page.  Previously I simply added the code to the bottom of the source code and it worked fine.  I added this new one to the same spot, at the end, of every single page.  Is this okay?

Third question - there are pages on my site which I cannot edit the source code - Blog page, News page, Photo Gallery - while not terribly relevant that people look at those pages, it would be nice to follow them too.  Is this possible?

Three questions and some what to do.  Don't anybody mimic me until Dominic answers those questions - I don't want to screw anybody else up like I do myself...

If what I did is okay, you all might want to look at the new source code script and change yours to this new one.