WordPress Plug-in of The Day: Ultimate GA
Posted on July 9, 2007, under Blogging, Tools and Services, WordPress.
If you use Google Analytics, you should take advantage of it to the fullest potential. With Wordpress a great plug-in called Ultimate GA. Ultimate GA makes it easy to do work with Google Analytics, it automatically adds the necessary code to the bottom of your template in the footer. My favorite feature is the ability to track outgoing links by attaching JavaScript code to all href’s without you having to do this yourself by hand. Ultimate GA has some other great option features like the ability to filter admin pages and filter the content of your postings to add the onClick event to track certain links. Full features below:
- Start with a simple configuration screen and hide more advanced/complex configuration in an Advanced Configuration mode
- Do not make any changes to feeds, as it is not wise to include JavaScript in those
- (Optionally) add Google Analytics JavaScript tracker code to the footer of all weblog pages
- (Optionally) add the same JavaScript tracker code to the admin pages if you want to track those as well
- When adding the JavaScript tracker code to a page, put it at the end of the body. There are quite a few WordPress plugins for Google Analytics out there. Most of them include the JavaScript in the head section. This can delay the loading of your page and is not advised by Google
- When using a WordPress theme that does not invoke the wp_footer hook as it is supposed to do, the JavaScript tracker code will be added to the head section. This can delay the loading of your page. The only way to prevent this, is to have the theme author implement the correct plugin calls, fix the theme yourself or start using another theme
- (Optionally) check for updates of the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin and warn you for updates on the Options page
- (Optionally) not adding the tracker code to the pages when a logged on user of a configurable userlevel requests a page. This can be used to ignore your own page views and not skew your statistics.
- (Optionally) filter the content of your postings to add the onClick event to track certain links
- (Optionally) filter the content of your comments to add the onClick event to track certain links
- When filtering the content of your postings and/or comments, you can select what links to track:
- (Optionally) add the onClick event to outgoing links. You can also specify links to which hostnames should be considered internal (e.g. www.example.com, example.com and example.org). Links to these hostnames will be considered internal and the tracking event will not be added to those links. You can also specify the prefix to append to the link when sending it to Google Analytics so your outbound links will be logged to a logical directory structure. This way, you will be able to easily identify what pages visitors clicked on to leave your site.
- (Optionally) add the onClick event to download links. You can specify which file extensions should be considered downloads. Only internal links to these filetypes will be tracked. Internal links are either relative links (without a hostname) or links to the hostnames you defined as internal. You can also specify the prefix to append to the link when sending it to Google Analytics so your download links will be logged to a logical directory structure. This way, you will be able to easily identify what files your visitors downloaded.
- (Optionally) add the onClick event to mailto: links. You can also specify the prefix to append to the link when sending it to Google Analytics so your mailto: links will be logged to a logical directory structure. This way, you will be able to easily identify what mailto: links your visitors clicked.
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