Just found this brilliant postthat tells you how to extract your search ranking from the URL that visits your site from Google. If all goes well, I should then be able to know exactly where my search terms are showing up in Google – I will be keeping an eye on this new profile to see what happens.
Failing this, SEO book has a great free tool for the Firefox browser that allows you to input the keywords you would like to keep an eye on and then it fetches their position information in all the main search engines including google.co.uk! It will be good to see if their is nay disparity between these data sets.
Following on from my last post, here is the analytics tracking code in the onclick handler that will pull the text entered into the contact form and submit it to google analytics event tracking. This will label each action with the users email address (although you could use any part of the form as a unique identifier). The benefit of this is if you select the paid search segment, and can link these email addresses (or other information entered on the contact form) to converted sales from your sales information then you will know what kind of return you are getting on your pay per click spend, such as adwords.
Use this code on the form button:
onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Form', 'Submit Contact', document.Form1.txtEmail.value);
You need to replace ‘Form1′ with the name you have given your form, and then change ‘txtEmail’ for the name of the particular part of the form you want to pull the value from.
*Apparently linking GA data to individual visitor info is in breach of GA’s terms and conditions – something about it being an invasion of privacy – so use at your own risk! I don’t see how this applies in this case, as it only affects visitors that contact you with their information, which they are sending to you anyway… so hardly an invasion of privacy? Still, you’ve been warned!
I wrote my first piece of javascript today! I have avoided getting in to this up till now as it has been easy enough to google something and C&C! Event Tracking is still too new so in order to solve my problem I had to do some research.
In the past, i have been used to transactions being carried out online – analytics can track it all (just about). Now though, our web leads are converted by our sales team, so we face the problem of linking our online information regarding visitor behaviour with our offline sales information.
Our leads usually come through a web form, these leads are filtered and entered into our sales database then distributed to a sales team – all done manually. So why do we want to link these pools of information?
Basically, we don’t know how successful our PPC campaigns are – if we are going to continue spending this money then we want to know our ROI. For this, we want to know the number and value of the converted leads that have been generated by a PPC source.
Event tracking allows us to see the source of the traffic for each form submit event, so if we can link sales information to the traffic source, we can gain some understanding of the revenue being generated by this channel.
By using an onChange handler to call a function, we can set the email address entered by a user in the form element as a global variable, which can then be entered as the ‘label’ in the analytics event tracking code.
Now we can link these two pool’s of data!
Update: by putting this.form.elementname.value in the event tracking code where ‘label’ used to be, you can achieve this with greater simplicity!
See more info, a disclaimer and the code here – apparently you may breach GA’s T&C’s by doing this, but it’s not clear in this case.
A great post about analytics and how to solve some of the problems that come with it.
A helpful little spreadsheet that can help figure out your ROI.
