[...] A blog post from E-Nor on Google Analytics [...]

Yes it does, if you have links on the press release to your site..

Let’s say your press release was picked by cnn.com or bbc.com, this hack allows you to track all visits to your site from links in the press release. All activities after that inside your site by the such visitors will be credited to:
Source = cnn.com or bbc.com
Medium = press_release

Great article!

I think I know the direction I have to go now, You got to pay to play!
Thanks for taking the time, to respond.

Have a great day.

Sorry for the short reply.
Trying to balance knowledge sharing with chargeable work.

The way I would approach it would be with Javascript.
There might be a way to do it with PHP but I am more familiar with Javascript for click events.

There is existing javascript out there that can be customized to place onClick events on every exit link.
As far as I can tell, all three items you want are available with javascript.
So basically you would customize the onClick event for exit links to get the information you need and send it off.

Hope that makes sense.

Yep I think you understand what I’m looking for…
If you could point me in the right direction, I would be in your debt. Short of spending a year learning PHP myself. Is this a complex solution? Your reply seemed to be cut off..

Or solution 2 – keep grovelling before our IT guy. (He’ll schedule it in….which means never)

Stan.

Great post. I almost invented the same method but I missed the part with window.location.HASH, which is a really beautyfull solution.

Tip: The exact same technique can be used to track traffic from search engines to specific “campaign pages” (read: SEO pages). You would then use paramateres like: “utm_source=google
&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=campaignpages&utm_term=” + GetTerm();

Best regards, Jesper

So basically you want to know points A, B, and C when someone clicks on an exit link.
But manually tagging all the exit links would be a royal pain.

Some custom javascript will do exactly what you want.
We have done similar auto-tagging of external links with javascript but to collect different data (for example, D, E, and F).

I have the problem in reverse!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Accurately measuring exits off site via 3rd party links in Analytics.

I have a scenario where external links all over our Word Press site. I would like to capture data in Google Analytics only when a user clicks one of our external links:

A) Which page(s) did they click the exit from (Filter for that)
B) The exact text of the link (Filter filter for that)
C) The html address of the exit link

I’m sure there is an elegant-automated way to do this.
With my limited understanding page exits (Top Exit Pages?)

I know “Last Page” measurement is impossible to measure! (So I won’t whine about that) – but being able to plot the exit links, that would be something!
———————————————————————–

I am aware you can use Event Tags. But this would mean you would have to manually tag every 3rd party link on a site with event tags! This would become impossible & onerous. And I think there is a maximum number of events Google Analytics will track per unique visitor (500?) – So what do you do for your articles with the the top 100 site links!

Even worse if you don’t tag those external links properly, Google treats this as a page bounce! The way I see it if somebody bothered to click a link you provided on your site, that’s not a bounce. Its engagement!

Some one suggested using jump pages-but I’m worried about the user being pissed off by the delay, and the page bloat on the site..

Is there an elegant way to do this with a PHP / WordPress solution.

Thanks
Stan.

And sometimes the URLs with campaign parameters are returned in search results, which places the visit in the wrong medium/source/campaign buckets.

So you use # instead of ? (along with an update to the GATC) and you can have the best of both SEO and Analytics worlds.

I have a situation where we write articles to promote our company/products and submit to a content syndication outfit. Editors of pubs, papers, blogs, etc. can then use these submitted articles for their use instead of writing content on their own. Since the articles we write get picked up all over the place (not a single referrer), I am using utm/campaign URLs to determine how many times we are receiving visits/pageviews from this syndication network as well as goal completions. Does this actually have a negative impact on SEO or is it neutral?

Yes that is very much possible.
We intended the above technique to be deployed on a case-by-case basis.

So the actual code to get a campaign name of bleh and replace what was in the post might be:

if (parameter == ’1′)
{
window.location.hash = “utm_source=”+srcPage+”
&utm_medium=bleh_stuff&utm_campaign=bleh”;
}

i.e. let’s say I know that all visitors who end up at a given url should be part of the same campaign, so mysite.com/bleh.html should always be the ‘bleh’ campaign.

is there a way in that page’s source code that I can do:

pagetracker._setCampaign(“bleh”) or even something like trackPageview(/bleh.html?utm_Camp=bleh) or something to that effect?

thanks

Thank you for posting.
I got the idea from you at the GAAC summit and was waiting to make good use of it.
I have always felt that good web analytics and good SEO can and should go hand in hand.

Thank you for your comment.
What we wrote near the end about the optional part isn’t quite what we meant so I updated the blog post.
setAllowAnchor is definitely required.
# in the original link is optional since you could use ? to begin your parameter list and still use the above method.

-Caleb

I had one minor question for this line:

“The last piece of code that needs to be added is the setAllowAnchor command, which allows the # sign to be used as a query string delimiter instead of the question mark (?). This part of the trick is sort of optional. We include it for thoroughness and because using # in incoming links instead of ? is for SEO reasons.”

It seems like the fact that using ? instead of # would require you to reload the page is a big enough deal that setAllowAnchor wouldn’t really be optional.