The Venture Skills Blog

One of the questions we are often asked is how we track various social media sites users and their interaction with sites the answer is in a variety of ways but here is just one of the techniques we use with Google Analytics.
Please note: through out this article we use the new ga.js script rather then urchin if your still using the old code their is not much to change

Campaigns

Google Analytics offers a way to track marketing campaigns by giving them unique markers, these are normally part of a URL for example

example.com?utm_campaign=mycampaign &utm_medium=banner&utm_source=otherdomain.com

In the above example we have a global campaign the type of link it was and where it came from, this is all well and good but it requires that we create a tracking URL to submit to our social media which is not likely to happen in an “organic” submission so we need to come up with an alternate solution.

Embedding Campaign details in page

Google Analytics is pretty flexible and so allows us to embed campaign tracking information directly into a page rather then a link.

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("YOURCODE");
pageTracker._setCampNameKey("mycampaign");
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey("banner");
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey("otherdomain");
pageTracker._setCampNOKey('ga_nooverride');
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

This is great for following users arriving on landing pages for instance, but in our use we want to add this campaign information only when they arrive from specific sites and so we are going to need to capture the referral information.

Social Referrals

Using PHP we can get referral information about how the user arrived on the page using HTTP_REFERER this interrogates packets sent by the browser for referral information. This technique is not hugely accurate users can manipulate such information and some browsers don’t send any referral information at all. But for what we are doing which is taking snapshots of social media users it will do the job perfectly. Once we have where they come from we need to compare it to our list of social media sites and then add our tracking details as needed.

/* Social Media Campaign organiser
For more info: http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2007/12/22/social-media-tracking-ga/
By Tim Nash */
/*Gather Referer info and find domain*/
$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; // Get referer string - remember not accurate!
$domain = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST); // Set domain as the Host of the referring URL
/*Select social media sites to track from*/
$social = array("stumbleupon.com","digg.com","mixx.com","sphinn.com");//Set Social sites array
/*Set campaign if a social media site referal*/
if (array_search($domain,$social)) { //search the array
echo "
pageTracker._setCampNameKey('social_media');
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey('".$domain."');
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey('".$url."');
pageTracker._setCampNOKey('ga_nooverride');
"; //add campaign details
}
?>

So in the above example code we have created a campaign called social media, the medium is set as the domain of the social media site and the source the exact url. You could also add an ID if you have several pages which are part of the same linkbait campaign.

Complete code

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
"https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
"google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("YOURCODE");
<?php
/* Social Media Campaign organiser
For more info: http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2007/12/22/social-media-tracking-ga/
By Tim Nash */
/*Gather Referer info and find domain*/
$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; // Get referer string - remember not accurate!
$domain = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST); // Set domain as the Host of the referring URL
/*Select social media sites to track from*/
$social = array("stumbleupon.com","digg.com","mixx.com","sphinn.com");//Set Social sites array
/*Set campaign if a social media site referal*/
if (array_search($domain,$social)) { //search the array
echo "
pageTracker._setCampNameKey('social_media');
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey('".$domain."');
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey('".$url."');
pageTracker._setCampNOKey('ga_nooverride');
"; //add campaign details
}
?>
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Understanding Reports

Rather then explaining how to access your campaign reports I’m simply going to point you to the expert at Epikone who have written a fantastic series on using campaigns (though never to track social media site users) and it would be silly to replicate their work to a lower standard.

What else can you do

The above code is pretty simple to modify, to tag users with a cookie, to redirect certain user groups and with a couple of minor changes can be used with clickheat maps or any other analytics program. One option is to uniquely identify users across your analytical scripts but be careful to declare such activities in your privacy policy and your P3P document.

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