• Shopping Cart – Your shopping cart maybe on a sub-domain, and you may wish to track traffic from your site into your shopping cart in one report profile. You may also want to set up goal tracking and funnels all in one profile.
• Blog – You may have a blog on a sub-domain – You would want to track traffic to and from the blog in the same profile
• Your site may use sub domains for site content instead of sub folders, and you want to track the traffic in one easy to manage profile
• Many other reasons…

If you don’t set up cross domain tracking your sub-domain account will produce lots of referrals from your main site, meaning that the original referrer such as Google will be lost. This means that potentially you are losing out on important data as to where your traffic is coming from when a users skips between your domains.

In order to track visitors between your main domain and sub-domains you will need to edit the tracking code that appears on both domains.

Lets suppose you want to track traffic between the www.mystore.com and cart.mystore.com. The tracking code to achieve this is indicated below:

Asynchronous syntax

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_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.mystore.com']);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Traditional (ga.js) syntax

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var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName(".mystore.com");
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
  pageTracker._trackPageview();

You will notice that there is a leading “.” before the domain name, this indicates that you want to track any sub-domain of this main domain. It is important that you add this tracking code to all pages on the main domain and sub-domain in order to track everything successfully.

I consider myself to be quite advanced in Google Analytics so therefore decided to take the Google Analytics test, where you have to get over 80% to pass. I went through all the tutorials on the Google Analytics Conversion University to familiarize myself with all the features before taking the exam.

I thought that taking the exam would be a great way of testing myself, ensuring that I know all about the many features of Google Analytics (and there are many)!

A few days ago I passed the exam, so I am now officially Google Analytics qualified. It’s good to know that I can prove I can use the platform at a professional level rather than just working on particular clients accounts.

I would suggest that anyone involved in Internet Marketing takes the test as its proof that you know what you are talking about.

To achieve this you have a choice of two different features in Google Analytics they are:

• Virtual Pageviews
• Event Tracking

Below I have detailed the different methods of capturing this data within Google Analytics

1. Virtual page views

The first method of tracking such events is using a virtual page view. Virtual page views are a way of faking a page view after a given event, say clicking on a video or an external link. This is achieved by adding the ._trackPageview function to the link. For example if you were to tag an external link to say www.google.co.uk you could use the following call.

pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/google.co.uk’);

When a users triggers a virtual page view the data is passed to Google Analytics and is recorded will all the other page views in the system, it is a good idea to use a strong naming convention to track your virtual page views, which is why in the above example I have used the subdirectory /outgoing/.
One problem with virtual page views is that it can greatly increase your overall page view figures, making it more difficult to analyse data.

The main reason you would use a virtual page view is so you can use the page view as a goal, and track conversions with it

2. Event tracking
Another way of tracking these events is to use event tracking, which is different to a page view. With event tracking you call the _trackevent() Javascript call within a link. This allows you to add the following attributes to a link

• Category – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• Action – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• Label – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• Value – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

As event tracking allows you to define more variables you can track more information such as page load times, how long a video is played and what buttons a user clicks. For example the below link shows how you could track a video, when someone clicks play, and the video is called ‘gone with the wind’.

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<a href="#" onClick=_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos',
 'Play', 'Gone With the Wind']);">Play</a>

You should be careful to plan which metrics you want to record, this will ensure that the data sent to Google Analytics is actionable. The advantage of event tracking over page views is that event tracking won’t ruin your overall page view data, the only disadvantage is that event tracking cannot be added into a goal which is slightly annoying. The data that you can get from this however is great and provides a huge amount of data to act on.

This tool makes it easy to filter unwanted data from your content report. It achieves this by allowing you to filter any metric by one of the following methods:

• Containing – a value to include
• Excluding – a value to exclude
• Less than
• Greater than – greater than a value
• Less than or equal to
• Equal to
• Not equal to
• Greater than or equal to

For example I might wish to filter my results that contain the keyword ‘insurance’ and have a conversion rate of higher than 2%. This will give me all the insurance terms that are greater than 2% conversion rate.

This tool would also come in useful if you were trying to remove all brand terms from a content report. You could simply use the exclude parameter and us to OR operator. For example for Marks And Spencer you could enter the following ‘ M&S | Marks And Spencer’. This will allow you to see the traffic for non branded terms, allowing you to view the more keyword related terms you are after.

The filtering tool is very powerful and filters lots of data really quickly, allowing you to make quick decisions about your marketing.

There is however one problem, how do you track outgoing links? For an affilate website this is very important. You need to know where your traffic is going to after it arrives on your site. If you started tracking outgoing links you would then be able to know which of your affiliate sites is receiving the most traffic, and where users are clicking on your site.

From this information you can move your adverts around to generate the most traffic to the affiliate you want. Usually the one that pays the best commission!

But how do you achieve this? Please see steps below:

Step 1

Add the tracking code to the links you want to track, in the example below the links are being tagged as affiliate program-1.

<a href="http://www.example.com" onclick="javascript: 
pageTracker._trackPageview('/out/affiliate-program-1');">

Step 2

Next you will need to move your original analytics tracking code to appear before the above code. It is good practice in this case to add the code to the header of the page.

Step 3

Well thats it! This will now fake a page view in your Google Analytics interface. To make tracking the links easier you should add the fake page view into a Goal (see image below)

Now each time a users clicks on any affiliate 1 tagged links a goal will be recorded. This makes it easy to track how many clicks each of your affiliate links is receving. The same principle can be used to track any type of out going links