Enhance Your Google Analytics Interface Experience

-1- Tracking and Reporting with Virtual Pageviews

How to Leverage Virtual Page views in Google Analytics

This is a great way to track downloads and find out how to improve your website content to speak directly to your site visitors.

Track with Virtual Pageviews

Another cool method of enhanced tracking is virtual pageviews. Maybe you have a bunch of nicely branded PDF files to track. The Google Analytics tracking code cannot be installed on PDF files so you cannot track them, right? WRONG! You can track how many times PDF files are downloaded easily. Additionally you can see exit rate, time on site, bounce rate and unique vs. repeat visitors.

Website Story

So I have this website that really does not have any other purpose than Free PDF file file downloads. Website visitors can visit this website and enjoy a very clean and crisp layout. There are about 40 html pages designed for providing Free PDF downloads of Christmas gift tags. These PDF files are perfectly laid out for printing at home with a few links on each page back to the website. At the end of the day there are over 100 PDF files that can be downloaded and freely printed by the visitor. All PDF files are nicely branded and contain thousands of reference links back to the "creating card art learning pad" section of the site. The learning pads are where we sell our products.

How to Track Using Virtual Page views

Google Analytics will track each PDF file with a minor tweak to the coding. Let’s use my site described above as an example. On this site all I want a visitor to do is download my beautiful printable Christmas gift tags. Here’s how I added a virtual page view that will show up in my Google Analytics reporting.

Tag your Links

So all I have added here is a small snippet of code right into the link reference code

onclick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/downloads/PDF/assorted.pdf’);

How to View your File Downloads Using Virtual Page views

In Google Analytics the easiest way to see how visitors are interacting with your PDF downloads is to navigate to top content and search for the file name you put in your code snippet. In this case I am going to look for “assorted.pdf”

Direct link to Top Content

I can see that this file was downloaded 21 times by 15 unique visitors with an exit rate of 28%- not bad. Each visitor spent about a minute to get the job done. Pretty cool eh? But wait there’s more, what if I wanted to compare this PDF download to all my other ones? Which one is the most favorite download choice of my visitors and why? I will again use the search tool, this time let’s query “downloads”. It is the virtual (unique) directory name I assigned in the above code snippet.

When I take a look at the report I like the looks of the second one. It has been downloaded 20 times but the visitor stays on my site for double the time. Even though the exit rate is a bit 13% higher I will take the time on site. What I want to do next is find out how my people got to these files. What keywords are they using to find these files? That would be helpful. My thinking is if I can see the best (most engaging) and the worst keywords I can improve my content message. I will do that by listening to what my site visitors are telling me about the pages they visit.

Finding the Answer

Keywords Used

Go to Content>Top Content>Drill down Page Name>

This is the index page to the PDF download page

How to find entrance keywords where most people entered the PDF download index page.

In green are the best (most engaging) keywords. Time on site, exit and bounce are the 3 dimensions I used to decide this.

What Does This Mean?

This was a test to see what keywords people use to find my product. Just as important is how engaged the visitor was when using those keywords. The green highlighted terms give me important insights to create very targeted content pages and keywords for my visitors.

Based on the information above I am going to create content pages for the following subjects:

1. Christmas Gift Tag Template Downloads.
2. Christmas Tag Templates Free.
3. Christmas Gift Tag Template 10 To A Sheet.
4. Free Christmas Gift Tags On Business Cards.
5. Free Gift Tag Downloads.
6. Free Christmas Tag Templates.

Why Does This Matter?

Next Christmas I will have a larger collection that will sell for $5.95 per set. I will use Google AdWords and natural rankings to drive traffic to the pages. Now I know the best content themes and keywords to use for maximum conversion. There are also many other keywords in this list you are not seeing that are also engaging. I will visit the entire list and cherry pick the keywords I want to promote my website with.

Virtual Page views Recap

So, now we know…

• The most popular files downloaded.
• The most engaging files downloaded (Time on site, bounce, exit).
• Where they entered.
• What keywords they used to enter index page.
• The best keywords used by visitors, fueling our next campaign with targeted visitor content.