I’m psyched to be speaking at WordCamp OC 2011 on May 14th this year! Great reason to visit OC, get some California sun, and meet some Southern California WordPress folks. Plus, how appropriate to be speaking at a WordCamp where the logo is a VW bus getting barreled. Hope to see you down there!
Speaking at WordCamp Orange County 2011
Integrate Google Analytics Source Data Into Zoho CRM Web-to-Lead Forms
I wrote up a quick tutorial showing how you can pull data from your Google Analytics cookie and feed it into Web-to-Lead (or Web-to-Contact) forms in Zoho CRM. This gives you the ability to see the source, medium, keyword, etc. for leads that come in. See the screenshot below for an example.
It is over on the SwellPath blog, with the necessary script as well. Enjoy!
WordCamp Portland Slides
Here are the slides I’ll be using at WordCamp this morning, pending no last minute edits. If you are not watching football, our out enjoying the weekend in other ways, make sure to catch the presentation live on the WordCamp Portland video streams. I’ll be in the developer track.
WordCamp Portland Talk this Month
I am psyched to be speaking at WordCamp Portland this month. My talk titled Measure Twice, Blog Once. It will be on a methods and tools that can help you get more actionable data on your WordPress site. WordCamp is a total bargain at $40. If you are interested in open source content management systems, blogging, the Portland tech community, or talking story with fellow geeks, you need to attend WordCamp. It is September 18th and 19th, at my old stomping grounds Webtrends.
I speak right before Matt Mullenweg; that’s a tough act to precede. It’s first thing Sunday morning, so get up early and I’ll see you there!
Migrating to Google Analytics Async Tracking Code
Customized Tracking Code
Customizations to tracking code can be as simple as modifying your code to track visitors across domains, or as complicated as setting custom variables or sending event tracking requests within the “tag”. Here is a text file displaying the migration of Google Analytics tracking code from the old version to the async version, using the code from this site as the example. In a nutshell, any function that previously was called with the “pageTracker.” prefix, is now wrapped in _gaqPush[] . The code on this site has been modified to trigger an event for every post viewed, to track who the author was. Read this post on tracking authors in WordPress with Google Analytics if you need clarification on the intended functionality. In the example script, you can see that I had to take the code that identifies and records the author, and modify it to use _gaqPush['_trackEvent'] instead of pageTracker._trackEvent(). You’ll also notice that the rest of the code is updated to the new async standards.
Downloads & Off-Site Links
Downloads and off-site links are typically tracked by using an onclick event to call pageTracker._trackPageview. Here is an example of how this has now changed. The following HTML/JavaScript:
<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamware” onClick=”pageTracker._trackPageview(‘http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamware’);”>connect with me on LinkedIn</a>
Would need to be modified to:
<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamware” onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', 'http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamware’]);”>connect with me on LinkedIn</a>
Notice again the the pageTracker code is ditched, and the attributes are now tucked into the gaqPush function with trackPageview.
Flash & AJAX
For requests made in Flash and AJAX, the change is essentially the same. Wrap any function calls (_trackPageview, _trackEvent, _setCustomVar) in the gaqPush function.
Events & Custom Variables
This is probably starting to sound like a broken record: take the existing function call and wrap it in the new gaqPush[] function. Here is an example of code that would be used to designate a visitor as registered using custom variables. It would have been:
trackPageview._setCustomVar(2, ‘RegisteredUser’, ’True’, 1);
but is now:
_gaq.push([‘_setCustomVar’, 2, ‘RegisteredUser’, ’True’, 1]);
Pretty basic modifications here.The important thing is just remembering where all the locations on your site are where you are using custom modifications. Most of our clients are at least using download tracking and off-site link tracking in some way, and many are using events and custom variables. The migration process won’t be immediate for some of them, but hopefully everyone will be using the async code within a couple months. I’d love to hear thoughts on any ways to make this process easier, and certainly on any details I may have left out. Here is Google Analytics’ official Google Code page on migration.
