« Count von Count gets nasty… | Main | The 2008 Elections – Indexed for your reading pleasure… »
Referral URLs in Blogger
By Brian | February 7, 2008 | Share on Facebook
For months now, I’ve been missing the ability to look at a particular page (or post) on my site, and find out exactly what page is driving people to visit it. My old Yahoo! GeoCities stats provided that capability, but Google Analytics never did. The best it would do is tell me which domains were sending traffic my way, and even that didn’t happen on a page by page basis, only for the site as a whole. Also, the Navigation Summary stats are somewhat flawed, since they always seem to suggest that the most popular source for a page (and the most popular destination) is the page itself. So either I’ve got lots of readers who click Reload a lot, or they’ve got a bug.
But all that has changed thanks to Reuben Yau, who has offered two ways to achieve this goal. The first is to use Google Analytics’ Filters function, which puts the referral URL in the “User Defined Value” section. The second involves modifying the tracking code that GA puts on each page on your site, in order to embed the referral URL in the existing stats. This seemed more complicated and more invasive, so I went with the first option and in just one day, I’m getting all the information I wanted (including specific search queries from the likes of Google, Ask, Yahoo and others that drove people to specific pages).
Reuben’s awesome post provides not only instructions, but screen shots on the setup process and resulting stats, so you can be sure you got things right.
Way to go, Reuben!
Topics: Tech Talk | 1 Comment »
FamilyGreenberg.Com is proudly powered by WordPress.
The template is from RFDN and has been modified extensively by yours truly
Here is the RSS feed for the Entries and here is the RSS feed for the Comments