I usually send out emails with links to document downloads. Is there any chance of registering statistics on those using Google Analytics?
Javascript and Google Analytics doesn't work in HTML emails, so you can't measure the clicks on those directly.
If you use an email service provider, like Mailchimp or one of the many others, they will provide click-tracking at not additional cost, so you could consider that. Most ESPs will have a free or freemium plan you can try.
Otherwise, you can do the following:
Route all clicks through a script that counts the clicks. Pros: accurate count. Cons: custom development, re-inventing the wheel.
Direct all the clicks to a landing page that has Google Analytics implemented. Pros: easy implementation, no custom development. Cons: extra click will lead to some dropoff.
I would recommend an email service provider. Besides the click-tracking, it will give you much better deliverability, testing tools, and reporting options.
You could try using an intermediary page that sends off the GA Tracking Beacon before redirecting to the download. This could either be done using JavaScript that works in a similar way to outbound link tracking or using a meta-refresh. Either way you would want to put a message on the page stating that the download will start shortly and a redirect link in case something goes wrong.
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I want to know what keywords brings users to our website. The result should be such that, every time a user clicks on a link of the company's website, the page URL, timestamp and keywords entered in search are recorded.
I'm not really much of a coder, but I do understand the basics of Google Tag Manager. So I'd appreciate some solutions that can allow me to implement this in GTM's interface itself.
Thanks!
You don't track them. Well, that is unless you can deploy your GTM on Google's search result pages. Which you're extremely unlikely to be able to do.
HTTPS prevents query parameters to get populated for referrers, which is what the core reason for it is.
You still can, technically, track Google search keywords for the extremely rare users who manage to use Google via http, but again, no need to do anything in GTM. GA will automatically track it with its legacy keyword tracking.
Finally, you can use Google Search Console where Google reports what keywords were used to get to your site. That information, however, is so heavily sampled that it's just not joinable to any of the GA data. It is possible, however, to join GSC with GA, but that will only lead to GA having a separate report from GSC and that's it. No real data joins.
By including Google Analytics in a website (specifically the Javascript version) isn't it true that you are giving Google complete access to all your cookies and site information? (ie. it could be a security hole).
Can this be mitigated by putting Google in an iFrame that is sandboxed? Or maybe only passing Google the necessary information (ie. browser type, screen resolution, etc)?
How can someone get the most out of Google Analytics without leaving the entire site open?
Or perhaps passing the data through my own server and then uploading it to Google?
You can create a scriptless implementation via the measurement protocol (for Universal Analytics enabled properties). This not only avoids any security issues with the script (although I'd rather trust Google on that), it also means you have more control what data is submitted to the Google Server.
A script run on your site can read cookies on your site, yes. And that data can be sent back to google, yes. That is why you shouldn't store sensitive information in cookies. You shouldn't do this even if you don't use google analytics. Even if you don't use ANY other code except your own. Browsers and browser addons can also read that stuff and you definitely cannot control that. Again, never store sensitive information in cookies.
As far as access to "site information".. javascript can be used to read the content on your pages, know urls of pages, etc.. IOW anything you serve up on a web page. Anything that is not behind a wall (e.g. login barrier) is surely up for grabs. But crawlers will look at that stuff anyway. Stuff behind walls can still be grabbed automatically, depending on what they have to actually do to get past those walls (e.g. simple registration/login barriers are pretty easy to get past).
This is also why you should never display sensitive information even in content of your site. E.g. credit card numbers, passwords, etc.. that's why virtually every site you go to that has even remotely sensitive information always shows a mask (e.g. ** ) instead of actual values.
Google Analytics does not actively do these things, but you're right: there's nothing stopping them from doing it, and you've already given them the right to do it by using their script.
And you are right: the safest way to control what Google can actually see is to send server-side requests to them. And also put all your content behind barriers that cannot be easily crawled or scraped. The strongest barrier being one that involves having to pay for access. People are ingenious about making bots about making crawlers and bots to get past all sorts of forms and "human" checks etc.. and you're fighting a losing battle on that count, but nothing stops a bot faster than requiring someone to give you money to access your stuff. Of course, this also means you'd have to make everybody pay for access...
Anyways.. if you're that paranoid about this stuff, why use GA at all? Use something you host yourself (e.g. Piwik). This won't solve for crawlers/bots, obviously, but it will solve for worries about GA grabbing more than you want it to.
I want to build an extension on Google Chrome which functions will be forwarding address illicit websites that email to parents, which prohibited it site address using DNS Nawala or something similar, with the extension prevents the expected negative impact of the use of the internet.
What are the steps that I did in building this extension ?
Thank you.
This is a very broad "how do I create my entire project" question, but I'll try to give you some broad advice:
An extension alone will not be enough for this. You're going to need a web service as well. You'll likely need to divide the project into two parts:
A Chrome extension that monitors the websites a person visits. You can do this by using the Tab API. Simply look at each site the user has visited and if they visit any of the illicit sites on a blacklist, take an action, probably by making an API call to the web service mentioned below.
You're almost certainly going to need to use a web service developed with a scripting language like PHP or Java, or something similar. This web service would take care of sending the emails to parents. If we're just talking about sending an email to one parent than this service could be quite simple. The extension would tell the web service to send an email when an illicit site is visited, and that's about it. If you're talking about a commercial project then this service would probably need to be a full fledged website that allows parents to sign up for these emails.
Again, this is a very broad question, and generally speaking Stackoverflow is more for asking specific programming questions. But hopefully this will get you moving in the right direction at least, so you can come back and ask more specific questions. :-)
On some of our pages, we display some statistics like number of times that page has been viewed today, number of times it's been viewed the past week, etc. Additionally, we have an overall statistics page where we list the pages, in order, that have been viewed the most.
Today, we just insert these pageviews and event counts into our database as they happen. We also send them to Google Analytics via normal page tracking and their API. Ideally, instead of querying our database for these stats to display on our webpages, we just query Google Analytics' API. Google Analytics does a FAR better job figuring out who the real uniques are and avoids counting people who artificially inflate their pageview counts (we allow people to create pages on our site).
So the question is if it's possible to use Google Analytics' API for updating the statistics on our webpages? If I cache the results is it more feasible? Or just occasionally update our stats? I absolutely love Google Analytics for our site metrics, but maybe there's a better solution for this particular need?
So the question is if it's possible to use Google Analytics' API for updating the statistics on our webpages?
Yes, it is. But, the authentication process and xml return may slow things up. You can speed it up by limiting the rows/columns returned. Also, authentication for the way you want to display the data (if I understood you correctly) would require you to use the client authentication method. You send the username and password. Security is an issue.
I have done exactly what you described but had to put a loading graphic on the page for the stats.
If I cache the results is it more feasible? Or just occasionally update our stats?
Either one but caching seems like it would work especially since GA data is not real-time data anyway. You could make the api call and store (or process then store) the returned xml for display later.
I haven't done this but I think I might give it a go. Could even run as a scheduled job.
I absolutely love Google Analytics for our site metrics, but maybe there's a better solution for this particular need?
There are some third-party solutions (googling should root them out) but money and feasibility should be considered.
Like a lot of businesses my employer is dealing with the new world of PCI compliance by avoiding the hard stuff and redirecting our customers to a third-party payment service. The process will entail the customer entering order details into our system but then being redirected to the merchant bank's payment service for the entry of those all important card details.
We wish to retain the services of some business that periodically fills in stages 1 and 2 of our order form with some dummy data, presses place order and sees that the URL it ends up at is in fact the one we're expecting, a bit like a bot or a web spider.
If it finds we've been clickjacked it would alert us by text message or twitter feed or whatever the cool kids are using these days.
Does anyone know of a service that performs this function?
No, I don't believe that there is a service like this. Usually companies with specific testing needs like this will use QuickTest Pro.
I'm still in the process of going through some suggestions and hammering out what exactly we're going to do but almost all the info I've gained has come from:
http://www.softwareqatest.com/index.html
A devastatingly useful site which provides more than answers to this functional testing scenario. There are a couple of Web-Based services which execute QA Functional Testing scripts against your site and send alerts and reports if the tests fail.
The two I had a quick look at were http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/ and http://www.watchmouse.com/en/
The latter service uses Badboy scripts in its tests so you can home brew them and then upload to their server for regular execution.