Web Analytics India

- Contributed by Robin Browne

Recently got like a beta invite to Viralheat.com. They describe themselves as,

a “simple and an affordable way brands, agencies, marketers and content producers to monitor consumer generated content on social networks to identify key trends, understand community engagement and perform competitive analysis.”

A rather tall order that. In the beta phase you get to create 3 profiles. Unfortunately, the snag begins here. Each profile is a single keyphrase. Which Viralheat then uses to track content across the social sphere. But, a single keyphrase per profile? I found this incredibly limiting. At the very least, you would like to specify a series of rules to define the profile.

Moving on

Once you have defined your profile (aka the single keyphrase), Viralheat reports on its mention from various platforms like:

• Microblogs : Twitter
• Sites : WP, Tumblr etc
• Video : A bunch of them, sadly the Youtube doesn’t seem to be on the list. Well, there goes 90% of the action.

But limited as it is at the moment, it has still been useful to me. Recently one of our clients launched a new product and it has been great to see in one place mentions of it across the social web. Thousands of tweets, blog posts and videos about it have been uploaded. And we have been able to track it on a daily basis. Viralheat also does some kind of semantic analysis of the conversation, it rates them in Positive, Neutral and Negative terms. I found it intriguing but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much information on how this thing works.

Moving Further On

In its limited manner, I like what I see so far. Would love to see them concentrate on:

• Coverage : More Platforms, More Sites (Youtube is a must)
• Profile Definition: At the minimum I should be able to include and exclude terms within a single profile

- Contributed by Gunjan Aggarwal

The best way to measure success of a blog is through RSS subscribers. Usually we get data about the RSS subscribers through feedburner. But we can also use Google Analytics to get that figure.

To Track the Clicks on RSS button, add following code within the :-

onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/rss/rsspic’);”

You can use any page name instead of ‘/rss/rsspic’.

Through OnClick function we are calling virtual page. We don’t have to create that page in our website.

This virtual page you can see in your top content list in Google Analytics. But if you want to analyze which post or category leads to more clicks on RSS button, then you have to set goal.

If you are using Blogger then to add the code go to Layout ->Edit

And if you are using WordPress, then go to Design->Theme Editor->Sidebar.php

To create a Goal in Google Analytics:-

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Click on Analytics settings
3. Under Conversion Goals and Funnels, click edit



4. Enter the information as shown in pic above. Goal URL should be same as given in code.Through this you will come to know only about number of clicks on RSS button. It doesn’t tell exactly about subscribers as someone might have clicked on RSS button but not have subscribed.

   It will be helpful to you to analyze the best performing post or category in terms of increasing subscribers.

   You can also use virtual pageview concept to track:-

   1. Clicks on banners
   2. Ajax-based activities
   3. File downloads
   4. Videos
   5. Dynamically generated pages – cgi, asp,php
   6. External Links

What more are the possibilities where you can use virtual pageview concept?