The main purpose of this post is to simply understand how I can, in GA, model the “Download Launch Sitecore” goal that we currently have modeled in our Sitecore site. Before that, a quick aside that has always confused me—visits, unique visitors and new visitors. Good to remind ourselves of the simple--yet still sometimes confusing—stuff.
A visitor comes to our site. The visit is counted as a visit. Plus:
If this is the first visit from this visitor in this reporting period, the visitor is recorded as a unique visitor.
If this is the first visit from this visitor ever (at least by available information, cookie, etc), the visitor is also recorded as a new visitor.
OK, not the purpose of this post. For this discussion, we want to end up with a simple goal modeled in both Sitecore Analytics (done), and GA. We’ve already discussed a full explanation of the goal strategy for Launch Sitecore, so for today we just have to concern ourselves with trying to track how many of our visitors download the Launch Sitecore package from our site.
A quick review of how we accomplished this in Sitecore. We had some choices here when we considered how to identify that our Download Launch Sitecore goal has been accomplished:
- Use the fact that our visitor made it to the page where the download is available
- Use the “onclick” event sparked from clicking the download link
- Identify the request to the actual Sitecore package (zip file stored in Sitecore’s Media Library) as the actual accomplishment of the goal
- Somehow figure out when our visitor ACTUALLY installed the Sitecore package
I put this list in order of effectiveness, in my opinion. Using #1 would give me the least confidence in the validity of the goal accomplishment numbers….#4 the most confidence. The nice thing with our decision in Sitecore—#3 is actually just as easy to model as #1. The reason: since the actual Media Library asset is referenced / stored in Sitecore (the zip file package), we can simply check off the Goal box for that Media Library item:
The same would hold true if we chose #1, since we could apply this goal to the visit of a page rather than a request of a Media Library item. #2 would actually take a bit more work, most likely setting the PageEvent (Goal) via the API. A couple lines of code, but more work than simply clicking a check box.
#4 is interesting, but balancing the work it would take with the additional benefits, it’s not yet done on Launch Sitecore (maybe a nice future feature). We would have to do something within the package install to call in the goal accomplishment.
Off to Google. To be fair, remember that this is my “out of the box” attempt at setting a Goal in my Google Analytics. And for now, just trying to achieve parity with the Download Launch Sitecore goal we already have in our Sitecore solution.
Turns out, easy enough. Since I can include the link to the actual Media Library asset:
http://www.launchsitecore.net/~/media/Files/Packages/LaunchSitecore6622.ashx
….this URL will now represent my Goal in GA. Less flexible overall, since I will have to remember to change this URL when we change the package file (or always keep the file name the same).
For now, this will be good enough for us to start tracking the same goal in GA. For consistency’s sake, we’ll also assign a Goal Value of 25 (same as the Engagement Value in Sitecore). My Launch Sitecore boss is already telling me this is too arbitrary, so as we go we better do a better job rationalizing (potentially monetizing) this goal value. I can see some CRM work in our future.
Off to model campaigns in GA (remember back to our Launch Sitecore exercise, where we have campaigns that represent Social Network Login visitors, visitors who click on an auto signature within a Sales Engineer’s email, and email (for future use).
