Today, I updated the Google Analytics code on a few sites. I wanted to try some things to do with tracking:

The family wishlist

Knowing which links people followed to external websites seemed useful. It may allow me to specifically target those sites for advertisement or commission.

I added some Javascript to the page which should track all external links:

$('a').each( function(i) {
	if ($(this).attr('href').startsWith('http')) {
		$(this).unbind('click').bind('click', function() {
			_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', $(this).attr('href') ]);
		});
	}
});

A smarter move would have been to strip all info from the href but the domain itself. It would make for neater, and more decipherable reports. It’s something I should do, though I probably won’t bother.

If I were more motivated, I would swap out amazon.com for amazon.ca when visitors are from Canada.

Bradicon

Over the past year and a bit, I’ve been manually tracking how many icons are created per day. More fun, though potentially less useful than the family wishlist stuff, I’ve now set up page tracking calls for:

1. When a file is queued for upload
2. When conversion from image to icon is complete
3. When the new *.ico file is downloaded

Downloaded is now a goal in Google Analytics, and there is a funnel consisting of those three events. I’m kind of excited to see what sort of neat information it shows me, but I suspect it won’t be anything very interesting or unexpected. Who knows though?

I will soon, and from now on!