by Bob Hazlett on February 24, 2010
PHP, Web and IT Stuff has a great tutorial on tracking Facebook Fan Page activity with Google Analytics. Yes, Facebook does have Insights tracking that any page administrator can access, but it only shows you data for fans and sometimes you’ll see a couple days delay in getting that information.
In short, here’s how they did it. Facebook pages will limit the amount of javascript that can be run on a page. Google Analytics requires javascript to work correctly. As a workaround, they’ve created a tool that allows you to embed your Google Analytics code in an image instead of using the standard javascript. You’ll have to create an image for each page you’d like to track. 
For example, if you have separate custom tabs set up on Facebook to display your products, talk about your services and give users an option to contact you, you’ll need 3 different image tag codes.
To get started, set up a Google Analytics account or add a new website profile if you already have one. Find your account number within the tracking code they provide. It will look something like UA-1234567-74. Finally, use their tool to create a custom image tag and then place it at the bottom of each page you need to track. FBML is a great tool to add HTML to your Facebook page.
If you’re super-cool, you can even host the code yourself. Hosting it yourself gives you the ability to see traffic to and from your site to your Facebook page.
The biggest benefits to using Google Analytics over the package that Facebook provides is the ability to track all users, not just the few that have become fans. Google also gives you all of the other functions like time on site, keyword tracking and map overlays.
by Bob Hazlett on January 1, 2010
If you’re a Google Analytics user, you’ll be happy to know the GA team is slowing rolling out new features. One of the coolest and most needed in my opinion is the ability to add annotations to your data over time. Annotations are small notes and snippets you can add to your timeline. They’ll help you keep better track, trend and paint a picture of what outside influences caused a sudden dip or spike in traffic. Now you won’t have IT, marketing and business scratching trying to remember what happened on a particular day 3 months ago.
Here are some ideas you could use annotations for:
- Track traffic spikes to your site after posting to social media pages such as facebook, twitter, and youtube.
- Note when products or campaigns launch to see how they impact visitors
- After commenting on a post, did you get any traffic back to your site? Make a note of the site and when.
- Track and don’t worry about forgetting when and how well that guest blogging gig turned out
Annotations are slowly rolling out to all users in January and should be in your hands by at least mid-January 2010. Want more information? Watch the Google Analytics Annotations video.
by Bob Hazlett on November 7, 2009
Trakkboard (free) gives you Google Analytics data on your desktop and the ability to easily create dashboards that pull data across multiple Google Analytics logins and profiles. Trakkboard uses the Google Analytics API to load data from Google Analytics and to display top level metrics all within the same view. It’s a neat little application and time saver for those of you that manage multiple Google Analytics profiles and would like an easier way to display the data on one screen.
