Now that you have an idea of what the tracking system does, we've provided you with a manual for how to use it. Of course, this is ultimately only useful for those clients who have the tracking system installed in their NewfangledCMS site. We've included this manual section both for their reference, but also to further quantify and specifically show how this system works and what the results look like.


The first step in using a tracker is to set up a tracking group. Think of these groups as buckets containing trackers that relate to a common set of tracker types or tracking efforts. Once you create tracking groups, you can then assign them specific trackers (whether they are trackable newsletters or aliases). In some cases, there may be a one-to-one relationship between a tracking group and a tracker. For example, you may be running a series of banner ads all for the same offer, but you might want to set up a separate tracking group for each tracker based on how you want to breakdown the overall tracking group session report as described above. If you want to see overall session trends (most active session and most view pages) separately based on each banner ad, you would set up a tracking group for each ad. If you wanted to combine the overall session information from all ads, you would assign separate trackers but assign them all to the same tracking group.

1. Go under "Do Stuff" open the "Tracking" area and click "Add Tracking Group." An editing screen will pop up, and you simply provide the name for your tracking group. You can also enter a description of the tracking group for future reference.

2. Once you have a tracking group in place you can start to add trackers to the groups. Go under "Find Stuff" and select the tracking group to which you want to add a tracker. After you have selected your tracking group, you will see both a list of trackers that already exist in that group (if there are any) as well as a link at the top of the list called "Add Tracker." Click on "Add Tracker," and a tracker popup screen will allow you to add a new tracker.

The Add Tracker screen contains four fields.

Tracker Title field is different from the actual alias name (see below). It is how the system lists the tracker internally so it should always be as descriptive as possible.

The Alias field is the actual word that will be used as the alias; it will be what follows the ".com/" part of the website address. You do not put in the full URL in this field, just the alias itself. So, if you wanted an alias for a Google Ad which would direct them to the white paper signup form you might provide an alias such as "ga_whpaper9-04." It's important not to put any spaces or special characters in an alias since it will become a part of a URL to your site.

The Alias Destination Link is the full URL (including the "http://www.your_company.com" part of the address) of the page that the alias will bring them to. In other words, if you want this alias to bring the visitor to the whitepaper request form the easiest way to enter the Alias Destination Link would be to go to that page on your site, copy the full URL out of the browser's address bar, and copy it into the Alias Destination Link field.

The Notify Email field is optional. It's used if you want to receive email alerts each time the tracker is initiated. You might want to enter your email address in this field if you are not expecting hundreds or thousands of hits.

When you purchase a Google Ad or some other online ad campaign, you provide them with a website address for the ad that contains the alias you set up (/ga_whpaper9-04). Whenever someone clicks on the ad, the tracking system begins to record the session.


The first report that you would see when reviewing your results is a list of the trackers themselves. For each tracker, the number of sessions and total page views per session are displayed. You can click on the # Sessions or the # Page Hits links to bring up a list of specific sessions and pages.



You can then click on a particular session and view the actual pages viewed by an individual...



Finally, you can view overall statistics of the entire tracking group. This report lists the top ten most active sessions and the top ten most viewed pages by that tracking group. As with the previous reports, clicking on a particular session's link will bring up that individual's sessions.




I'll conclude this month's newsletter with an appeal. By now, I'm sure if you've ever clicked on one of our newsletters, you may be feeling the heebie-jeebies, knowing that we've been tracking your every step. Well yes, it's true, if you call me up and ask me, I can probably look up your email address and tell you all the pages you've looked at ever since you triggered our tracking system by clicking on our email newsletter. Please know that we only use this information the way all of our clients should--to help us understand what you want/need/or are interested in--so we can make our services better. Also, if you can bear it, please don't stop reading our newsletters! ;-)