Read Google Analytics Cookie Script
I’ve taken some time out to write a script that provides a nice API to access Google cookies. If you’ve seen the Google cookies before, they can look pretty cryptic and will require you to memorise the syntax of how the cookies are formed which you don’t necessarily want to do to save brain space.
I won’t really go into the intricate details of Google cookies so this post will assume you know what you’re looking for. I may write up a post to explain more in-depth how Google cookies work later on. In the mean time, you can watch this presentation by Google on cookies (it’s pretty good!) or read the documentation to find out more about Google cookies.
So how is this useful? Well it really depends. You may use it to read GA campaign values and integrate it with your CRM system to track where your leads/sales are coming from or write custom scripts that integrate with GA (i.e. custom variables). It’s really up to you!
Anyway, on to the script.
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Google Analytics: Does 301/302 Redirect Preserve Referrer Information?
In case you’re wondering whether 301 redirects preserve the referrer information or not and how this may affect Google Analytic’s referrer information, I’ll show you a simple example.
So pretty much what I did was I did a Google search for clothes and found some ads on the right hand side. I used firebug to extract the destination URL as I didn’t want to inflate their costs because I’m just doing an example. What I look for are obvious tracking URLs that track and monitor search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns such as DART (Double Click).
You can also figure this one out by seeing the domain of the URL. If this is different to the display URL, most likely this is a tracking URL because Google Adwords has enforced the policy that the destination and display URL must be the same (it’s ok to use tracking URLs though as long as you land on the same domain as the display URL).
New WordPress Theme Coming Soon
Above is the new theme I’m working on to integrate with my current setup. The theme is called epsilon by web2feel. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up by the end of the week.
It utilises jQuery which causes conflict with the social bookmarking plugin which uses the Prototype framework. I might have to write my own plugin or modify the plugin to integrate it with jQuery. Haven’t had much experience with jQuery but it seems to be a popular javascript framework. Would be a good chance to learn it.
Also this template seems to seamlessly integrate Google Adsense into it, which is something I’ve been meaning to play around with more but haven’t had the time.
Blogger: Social Bookmarking Widget – Link Baiting
I promised Hong Yi’s mum that I would write a social bookmarking widget for her blog on Google‘s Blogger so I’ve spent part of my valentine’s day writing this widget for her.
The purpose of utilising social bookmarking widgets is to allow you to expand your reach of readership to literally hundred and thousands to millions of readers on these social bookmarking websites. Therefore, you are not limited to your normal direct traffic, existing referrals traffic and organic traffic but if I may use a SEO term, using ‘link baiting’ to bait readers in an ocean of readers to your website in the hopes of driving traffic, increasing visibility and branding, and ultimately getting links to your website.
One of the most important SEO aspects is link building or in other words, to increase the amount of links to your website. It creates authority, trust and relevancy to your website, thus improving your organic rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). You can also read my post on how to optimise your page.
Of course it is important to remember that before you submit your own articles, make sure that you write well, have a very attractive and optimised title, and a great first paragraph. In addition, write about what people would love to read about, things that are useful, relevant and informative to them. Never submit articles that are too “salesy” in nature and obviously useless information to the general public (i.e. how you’re emo-ing about the rainy weather).
Include pictures, videos and space out your paragraphs. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a screen full of words bunched up together.
Social Bookmarking Widget
I’ve only created this widget to include some of my favourite social bookmarking websites. Feel free to modify the code and stylesheet to your preference.
Here’s a screenshot of what the widget should look like once implemented (highlighted in yellow). You can visit my old blog to see how it looks like (make sure you turn off javascript or else you’ll be redirected back here).
Before you do anything to the Blogger template, please make sure you that save a backup before making any changes!
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Limitations of Client-Side Javascript Redirect – Blogger to WordPress
You may have read my previous entry on performing a 301 redirect from Blogger to WordPress, where I wrote a script that will capture all traffic to your old Blogger site and redirect it to your new WordPress site. Ideally you’d want to do the 301 redirects from the web server, but unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that and thus, you’re left with the client-side solution: Javascript.
First of all, let me clarify briefly on my previous post and inform you what the core strengths of my script are.
- Client-side redirect will not work without Javascript. Pretty obvious huh? What that means is that search engine crawlers aren’t able to follow the redirect. Nasty limitation in a simplistic sense.
- Strengths of my script are:
- It works.
- You need a client-side solution if you’re on Blogger. No other way.
- It captures and redirects all traffic from your old site to your new site.
That being said, let me now expand on these two major points: the limitations of search engine crawlers and why is capturing traffic important.