A Little Website Tracking Brain Dump

Okay, first of all, this blog post is primarily written for webgeeks, or people who want to fine tune the marketing of their website.  If you are one of these types of people, read on.  Otherwise, you might get bored out of your mind or your head may explode!

I’ve been doing a little bit of thinking lately, and have been wanting to perform a little experiment from a web marketing standpoint.  I’m familiar with website logs and stats, etc… but I needed to a little more digging into where exactly my hits were coming from and how my clients were finding me when conventional methods would not work.   A good example to look at is Facebook.  When viewing stats, whether it’s via your own server logs, google analytics, or piwik (what I currently use), it can sometimes be unclear on how things are going down with your website without taking advantage of the tools that are at your disposal.

A good comparison to use would be certain types of scans that are done in the medical industry.  Yea, x-rays, mri’s, etc… can be performed, but sometimes they don’t provide the clearest of pictures as far as what they are seeing.   And in these cases, they utilize dye’s that propagate themselves through the human body.   These dye’s make it much easier to see certain areas of the human body on the scan, greatly enhancing the imagery of what’s going on underneath the surface.    And well, when it comes to website statistics,  there are similar tools.

So in both Google analytics and Piwik, you can do some more ‘advanced’ tracking to see which of your marketing avenues is providing the most return.  I do this often, and I tend to get some pretty interesting results, but now I’ve started to utilize QR codes in my tracking, which reduced the chances of my url’s being butchered by e-mail programs, copying and pasting, and various other things that tend to deal harshly with url parameters.    A few people have asked me about this, so I decided that I was going to create a blog post on how to do this using an open source tool called Piwik and taking advantage of it’s campaigns and goal features.

And if you haven’t heard of Piwik, it’s an open source alternative to Google analytics.   I  don’t hate google analytics, though, and I actually use it on some of my sites, but I just like having control over my own stuff.  It’s a geek thing!  But if you host your own websites, I suggest you look into it.  It’s pretty sweet, and it’s available on many control panels of well known website hosting companies.

If any of you have looked at your referrer logs and looked at the hits coming from Facebook, you might have noticed that they use redirects for their links.    So for example, when someone follows a link from Facebook to my kingphotosonline.com website, instead of the actual page that referred the link, I see their redirector at work, which looks like this  “http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kingphotosonline.com%2F&h=BAQEnOEhJ”.  Well, there’s no way to tell whether this was a link followed from my wall, my fan page, or someone else’s wall, etc…, which can be very irritating for someone trying to improve upon the marketing of their site.   Well, this is where the iodine comes in.

So first, I created some goals within my Piwik application.  And for those who want to see the stats yourself, I created a new entry for this blog and added some sample goals to see if they will be reached.    The address is http://stats.marcellusking.com and the username is demo.  Password is demo123.    Don’t be afraid, have a look and hit me up with any questions you may have.

So what exactly is a goal?  Well, in Piwik, you can set up goals that are triggered once they are reached.  These are very handy and you may also attach a money amount to them so you can get a good idea of how much revenue you are ‘potentially’ making when users hit a certain area of your website, whether it’s an order confirmation page, or looking at a certain product.    I’ve included a screenshot of what the goal creation page looks like since you can’t see it while logged in as the demo user.   (Yea, I’m not going to give you admin access to my statistics site.  Sorry!)

So here, you can see that I’ve created a goal that will trigger every time someone reaches the about me page.   And I’ve put a revenue value of 500 dollars on it, because you know, I’m worth it!   And on the next screenshot, you can see the other goal as well on the goal overview page.

Okay, so what about the campaigns? Well, you need to do a little reading on how they work, but the Piwik website also has a url generator in which you can plug in your existing url and it will add the necessary parameters for creating a link that will function as a campaign link in your Piwik installation.   A screenshot can be found below

So, here’s my experiment! I’ve already created my barcodes, which you have to admit, those 2d barcodes create  bit of curiosity to what’s contained in that barcode image.   Everybody loves a mystery, hehe!    There are two barcodes, and there’s also just a straight up link to this webpage.  But all 3 use url parameters, so when we are looking at the statistics for the site, we can see exactly which method is producing links, and out of those methods, which ones are actually reaching website goals.

Okay, so here are my two barcodes (there are many tools out there for generating these), and for those of you who are initiated and haven’t seen these before, these are QR barcodes, which are becoming more and more commonplace since they can contain lots more information than a regular barcode as well as arbitrary text, website links, and much much more.  I’m actually considering putting them on the back of my business cards which I will then print on demand for a particular event, which will have a url created ahead of time so the only thing customers have to do is scan the barcode to reach that particular gallery, which will come in handy for my hidden galleries.  But enough of that, back to the subject.   In addition to the barcode, I also have just a plain text link that I will post on my wall so that I can compare that method to the barcode method.

So if you want to see the results for yourself, or just explore some of the features of Piwik, here’s the link to my statistics tracking site.   Feel free to log in and take a look.  Don’t worry it’s safe, and you won’t break my site.

http://stats.marcellusking.com

Username = demo

Password = demo123