Words from Alejandro U. Alvarez
Posts tagged analytics
Event tracking – Google Analytics
0970 days
Hello everyone,
As most people do, I'm sure you use Google Analytics for the stat metrics for some of your sites, so you'll love this new feature:
If you use AJAX in your site, or if you want to track outbound links, or downloads... etc then this is really useful for you.
What is event tracking?
In simple terms, it logs events that happen on your site, for example rate a post (If you have post rating), download a file... or you do some sort of JavaScript processing that you want to measure.
So finally, we can keep track of AJAX interactions with the server, we can log also normal POST requests that do some php processing, like posting a comment, or editing some data in our database.
Using Event Tracking:
This step couldn't be possible easier. First of all make sure you have the new code installed. The new code 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"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-3181088-6"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script>
That var pageTracker is what holds the tracking object.
Example:
Imagine we have a site where we feature some sort of mp3 downloads. And we want to track those with Analytics. In the link to the file we would put:
<a href="song_file.mp3" title="Download file" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Music', 'Download', 'Song number 4');">Download song</a>
As you can see we use the function _trackEvent, from the pageTracker object. This function takes 4 parameters, Category name, action name and a label and value:
_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)
The category can be used to store different events that are similar, for example in the category music we could use the actions Download, Listen, Rate... And finally the label, that is normally used to refer to which specific object in that category you are referring to, in this case which song.
From the Analytics panel
Wait for a day after you install this to see the data in Google Analytics, and then go to the stats panel, go to the Content tab, then you'll see at the bottom Event Tracking:
I've created a sample profile with some events and I clicked a couple times to show you how it looks like:
Screen capture of the Event Tracking page
Well I hope you found this useful, more information on the Google API
How do you use this?
Have you found any sort of smart uses for this? Please share with us 
Measuring the quality of your blog
01258 days
Although there are a lot of online resources to measure the wuality of your blog, like Blog Juice, Website grader (The bottom of the resports is dedicated to blog) and others like Technorati Authority, all of this services focus on popularity and sometimes SEO aspects.
Taking into account that all a blog is about is people reading your content, the best way to measure your site's quality is to use Google Analytics and check the time spent per visit, and the time spent per page. This way if you see 90% of the visits spend less that 10 seconds on your page, who cares if your traffic is 10k, your blog does not have quality. It may be the design, the content, something that is making the users leave even before they had time to know what it was about.
As you can see in the image, you have an average, a daily basis, and a visual graph displaying the variations. An ideal time would the one it takes the user to read the article and maybe post a comment. Most users will take about a minute to do all that. If your average is under a minute, then you must do something, go through the stats, page by page, and check how much time they spend on each page, that gives you an insight of what's happening.
Also check the main exiting pages (Which will usually be the same ones they entered) and sometimes you'll see a particular page being exited too much, it is usually because of the article title, an egaging title will keep your visitors on the site, at least long enough to determine whether your article is interesting or not.
Something that is usually a great way of keeping your users on the site is putting an image always on each article. It gives a visual representation of what the article is about, and as you know, an image is always understood faster than a whole paragraph.
Another great way to help the reader know what the article is about is highlighting important words. It helps the user know where to look when skimming through the article.
Follow this simple tips and you'll increase the time users spend on your blog, which hopefully will mean that they will start to read your articles from start to end!