Google Analytics is quite the most popular analytics software available. It offers a lot more than just an overview about the number of visitors and pageviews. Getting an expert on the topic requires some time for reading and playing around with all the functionalities the tool has to offer. Event Tracking, Site Search, Ecommerce Tracking and Custom Variables are features that make Google Analytics more customizable and help to fit the report to a sites special needs.

General Resources

The Google Analytics Developer Docs provide comprehensive information about Google Analytics for both, beginners and experts while news, useful hints, tips and tricks about the tool are provided on the coresponding blog. The Analytics Channel on YouTube offers a bunch of clips, including the well known Web Analytics TV casts with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski – a must see for web analytics experts (and those to become).

Event Tracking

Event Tracking is a method available that can be used to record user interaction with website elements, such as a Flash-driven menu system, outbound or download links. This is accomplished by attaching the _trackEvent() method call to the particular UI element that needs to be tracked (e.g. within the onclick function of an anchor element). When used this way, all user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Events in the Analytics reporting interface. Additionally, pageview calculations are unaffected by user activity tracked using the Event Tracking method. The design model for Event Tracking is highly flexible, and it an be extended well beyond the common model of user-triggered events. Events can be classified by category, action, event and value which requires a clean analysis strategy and planing about how the tracking should be integrated and how the metrics should be calculated later on.

Site Search

With Site Search, you can see how people search your site once they are already on it. There is no additional tracking code necessary. The feature can be activated within the Google Analytics interface by just setting the search query parameter (a simple request parameter reflecting the users search term within the search context). The report not only shows the site users initial searches, but how they attempted to refine searches when they didn’t find what they were looking for. You can see which pages they searched from and where they ended up and how site search correlates with conversion an other activities.

Ecommerce Tracking

If you run a ecommerce site, the Ecommerce Tracking feature will allow you to track and analyse ecommerce activity. Basically, it is based on the same principal as standard pageview tracking. JavaScript code sends some data to a Google Analytics server by requesting an invisible gif file. The big difference is that ecommerce data is sent rather than pageview data. The data transmitted is stored in a transaction object, containing all the related information about a single transaction, such as the order ID, shipping charges, and billing address. This transaction object itself contains several orderline items and the details about a particular item, such as SKU, price, category, and quantity. As with the Site Search feature, Ecommerce Tracking must be enabled in the profile’s settings.

This feature can not only be used for tracking real commerce activities, but also for tracking conversions (as Google Analytics still lacks a pure conversion tracking). For example, the report features “Days to Purchase”, “Visits to Purchase” or “Product Performance” can simply be mapped to activities like ordering a newsletter, subscribe to a feed or getting in contact. Knowing how many visits to a site it takes to convert a visitor in doing some action is useful and tracking those informations is very simple. Just use fixed values for your items and transactions so all activities get summed up. E.g. track an “product” item that is called “Newsletter” with a fixed price, category and quantity whenever a user submits a registration form.

Custom Variables

Custom variables are name-value pair tags that can be added to a sites tracking code in order to refine tracking. With custom variables, additional segments, others then the ones already provided by Google Analytics, can be applied for tracking and help to add more information to Google Anylatics. They can be used for content categorization, segmenting members from non-members, tracking campaigns a visitor sees prior to converting and many more. Custom Variables can be used in three different scopes:

• The visitor-level is active for the live of the visitor cookie and helps to distinguish categories of visitors across multiple sessions. E.g. you can track demographic information, customer type data (customer, subscriber etc.) or source information (where did the visitor come from).
• The session-level scope is active for a visitors session and allows to distinguish different visitor experiences across sessions. E.g. a custom variable can be scoped to the session level for user login status or for recording that the visitor viewed a special section of the site.
• The page-level scope is active for single pageviews, events or transaction calls. It is used to define a collection of page-level activities by users. E.g. on a blog website, this level can be used to track the category an article is assigned to (to get the most popular categories). This scope might collide with Event Tracking, so a good planing on how to use both features is required.

Custom Variables are tracked by using the _setCustomVar() method. It requires a slot-id, a name, a value and a scope definition (visitor, session, page).