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How To Track Lenses with Google Analytics

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Discover Where Your Visitors Come From

Squidoo provides pretty good statistics about how many visitors come to your lenses, and what they click on. However, sometimes a Lensmaster wants to get even more information about who is coming and where they are from.

Google Analytics has been a popular choice for Webmasters, but it not been possible to track Squidoo lenses with it. Until now. This tutorial shows you how you can add the GA tracking code to all of your lenses, letting you see more detail about your visitors.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics"Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you're more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites."

Tracking a Squidoo Lens with Google Analytics

Step-by-step instructions

Squidoo have made it super easy to track all your lenses with one single setting on your profile. All you have to do is enter the Campaign ID and Squidoo will take care of the rest. Best of all, you'll be able to see visits to your Lensmaster profile, awards and SquidCasts.
  • 1Login to your Analytics account, and click on Add Website Profile
  • 2Enter www.squidoo.com - this will allow you to track all of your lenses in one place
  • 3On the next page, look for where it displays your Web Property ID.
    It should look something like this: UA-123456-1
  • 4Copy this ID and paste it into the Google Analytics setting of your profile settings
  • 5After a day or two, you should start to see the data in your Analytics account
Setup Your Google Analytics on Squidoo

More about Google Analytics on Squidoo

Announcements from the SquidUtils and SquidooHQ blogs

Google Analytics comes to Squidoo!
Here is some news that is sure to delight all you stats junkies: Squidoo integrates Google Analytics for Lensmasters. By this I mean properly integrated, with all that yummy Javascript goodness that we haven't had until now.
What is the advantage of using Google Analytics over regular Squidoo stats?
Lensmasters have asked for more powerful reporting tools, such as the ability to view aggregate traffic for all lenses, filtering for specific date ranges, and bounce rate and time on page statistics. With this in mind, we have decided to offer full Google Analytics access for lensmasters.

What Statistics You Will Get?

Here are just some of the useful metrics that will be available to you from Google Analytics.
  • New vs. Returning Visitors
  • Length of Visit
  • Bounce Rate - do visitors explore your other lenses, or not?
  • Countries and Cities - where your visitors live
  • Aggregate Traffic for all your lenses, over time
  • Traffic Sources - see all your referrers, search engines and keywords New!
  • Lens titles - you used to only be able to see the URLs of lenses New!
  • Other pages - see when visitors view your profile and award pages New!
Important!

Your Mileage Will Vary

Squidoo have their own criteria for tracking visits, so the numbers you see in Analytics will never match those on your dashboard. This is explained more fully in this blog post on SquidooHQ.

Tracking Events

Squidoo have very graciously passed on their event tracking data to Lensmasters. If you look in the "Content" section of your Analytics, you'll see a option to view "Events". These are split up in to Categories, Actions and Labels. Here's an overview of what to expect:
  • Clickout: These are all the clicks to other websites from your lenses. When you view this event category, you'll see the each domain as a separate event action. Click on any one of these to see that individual pages (labels).
  • Lens: Clicks on a lens that stay within Squidoo. There are main actions for the Lens category are:
    - Discovery-Sidebar: the event label will tell you which lens a visitor clicked on.
    - RelatedTag: when visitors click on tags in the sidebar.
  • Widget: See how many clicks you are getting on specific modules, like Amazon Spotlight or Featured Lenses. The event label will tell you which lenses they were on
  • Social Icons: Clicks on the RSS, Facebook, Twitter, etc icons at the top of the lens
  • Guestbook: when someone comments on a lens, or loads the full list to read.

Google Analytics Tutorial

A brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface. If you are new to Google Analytics or you'd like to pick up a few tips on how to use some of the different features, this video is a good place to start.
Google Analytics Interface Tutorial
by Google | video info

147 ratings | 153,152 views
curated content from YouTube

Advanced Setup Options

For Google Analytics

If you go to the Profile Settings for your Squidoo profile on Google Analytics, you'll find some advanced options that you can tweak to improve the stats you see.
  • Goals - track whenever you get a new fan, or someone reads a squidcast
  • Filters - use these to excluded your IP address, so that your own visits don't influence the stats
  • Site Search - enable Site Search with 'q' as the parameter, and you'll see when people search amongst your lenses

Example Data from Analytics

Here are some of the advanced analysis you can do

See which countries your visitors come from for a single lens.

See which countries your visitors come from for a single lens.

See which countries your visitors come from for a single lens.
See traffic to your Lensmaster profile, and see where visitors go next...
Compare traffic against previous weeks or months...
..and see which lenses have performed better or worse.

Learn More About Google Analytics

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thefluffanutta

I write about what I know, and I build tools for Lensmasters at SquidUtils.com. Read more about me on my Lensography, and follow me on twitter. more »

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