Reid Dossinger

How to see if Google Analytics events are firing with Chrome Developer Tools

If you’re using Google Analytics and are using the events tracking, you’ve probably spent a decent amount of time clicking on your links and then waiting for them to show up in your reports. But there’s a way to use developer tools to see if the events are firing correctly as you’re clicking the link.

I found this article that shows how to do it in Firebug, but Firebug in Chrome really stinks, so here’s how to do it using Chrome:

1. Open Chrome’s Developer Tools (wrench icon -> Tools -> Developer tools, or ctrl+shift+I).
2. Click the Network tab in Developer Tools
3. Click on the action that you have events tracking set up on.
4. Find the _utm.gif that will show up in the left column of Developer Tools that should have loaded when you clicked the action that you’re tracking with events. (note: I usually find it’s easier to find if you clear out this screen—with the clear button just below the left side—before you click on your action)
5. In the Headers tab on the right, you’ll see the request URL. Look for the utme variable that will show if the event fired properly, and that will show the category, action and label of the event.
   

For example, to track a click on a mail to link, here’s what the variable looks like for me: &utme=5(email*send*rdossinger%40example.com), showing the category ‘email’, the action ‘send’ and the label of my email address. It’s working!

How to add Google Analytics campaign code to every AddThis share

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site.

<script type="text/javascript">
var addthis_share = 
{ url_transforms : 
{ add: { 
     utm_campaign: 'AddThis', 
     utm_source: '{{code}}', 
     utm_medium: 'share' } } }
<script>

The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie “delicious”, “googlereader”, etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters.You’re just adding in the standard Google Analytics variables in place of the “name” and “favorite number” in the example. Of course, you could add in whatever parameters and values you want, but this works really well for GA, meaning you can now track traffic that comes from links shared through AddThis and create a custom segment for that campaign, meaning you can track just how far those AddThis links are reaching.It should also be noted that you can put all AddThis javascript in the head so that it doesn’t have to load more than once. See the “Optimize AddThis Script” secition at the bottom of this page.

Fixing The Feedburner/Google Analytics Campaigns

How many people you think they got working on that Feedburner thing over there? One? Half? A summer intern? A guy who works on it while he watches football?

The flaws and problems with Feedburner have been frustrating to say the least, so I was pretty damn excited when, a little over a month ago, Feedburner finally announced that they were integrating the ability to add in Google Analytics campaign data to the end of feed item URLs. This was huge. Before this, you had to add in the string into the original RSS feed, which most of us couldn’t do since we didn’t have access to that original feed, but wanted to track when people were coming from our feeds.

My excitement ended, though, when I cranked up the feature and saw what it did to my stats. Yes, it was helpful to see who came from Google Reader or Bloglines, but if the content was syndicated, it stripped out the referrer. This was a problem with my music blog. Hype Machine is by far and away our #1 referrer, and when I implemented this change, the clicks from there went to almost none, because the campaign source was hard-coded in there as “feedburner”. Which was not helpful at all. If the campaign is already “Feed: {etc}”, then what does having the source as “feedburner” tell you? Nothing, that’s what.

My Solution
When the campaign feature was first announced, I noticed an interesting dynamic code in the “content” area: ${distributionEndpoint}. This made much more sense in the source area, so I put it there instead of “feedburner”, only to find that the only distribution endpoints that Feedburner acknowledged were Google Reader, Google Feedfetcher and Bloglines. Now, wouldn’t it just make sense to have this include whatever site referred it? Yes. But that’s Feedburner for you.

But what happens when it doesn’t acknowledge one of those few endpoints is that it just leaves it blank. So what I did, see, is to go ahead and put ${distributionEndpoint} in the source, so that when the feed doesn’t find Hype Machine (which it probably won’t for a while) or any of the other endpoints that it won’t find, it just uses the referring site as the source like normal. And my referrals from Hype Machine are back to where they were.

By the way, I hate to badmouth Feedburner so much. It really is a really good service. But I get really frustrated with some of the half-assed implementation that Feedburner (among other Google properties) implements, suggesting that the services are not really much of a priority for Google.