GAConfig: Raventools site Helps Webmasters Set Up Their Analytics
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GAConfig: Raventools site Helps Webmasters Set Up Their Analytics

10th January 2012

As a webmaster you want to keep track of what happens on your website. One of the best tools to do that is Google Analytics. You can see how many people visit your website and you can track how they got there. But Google Analytics can do a lot more than that. The “problem” however for many webmasters is that they have no idea how to configure their Google Analytics so they can track even more.

Now what you could do is take a course, read a good book or scour the web hoping to find articles about Google Analytics which tell you what to do. I think many webmasters do just that. The people at Raventools must have figured they would help these people get set up. Today they are launching gaconfig.com, a website which helps you set up your analytics configuration.

The tool was thought of by Raventools’ Taylor Pratt who says in his blogpost today:

“I dreamed up GA Config because I found there were two topics I constantly needed help with: Setting up my Google Analytics account and Setting up goals and KPIs.”

I think he might just hit the hammer on the nail for many webmasters there.

He also says:

“With the wrong code, you can miss important data that would have helped you make decisions for better conversions or sales online. That’s what makes GAConfig.com so valuable. It simplifies what can be very confusing for marketers who want useful data but don’t want to spend every day with their analytics.”

So what does the tool do?

The tool has several functions you can use.

Setting up your accounts

For starters you can easily set up tracking for one or multiple domains. You simply enter your Google Analytics account number and off you go. It is much like filling in a form, just follow the directions, get the code from GA Config and put that code in the right place.

Other things you can set up are site search and 404 tracking.

Setting up Goals and KPI’s

The most interesting part is setting up goals and KPIs. Setting up goals has never been that easy. You can do event tracking, set goals with specific destination urls or track the links you share.

Lets take setting up “Events Without a Confirmation Page” as an example here. This for example can be used for tracking comments, RSS Subscriptions or file downloads or vides.

The steps are pretty simple. We first choose what we want to track, lets try to track RSS Subscriptions, so we look at them without having to go to Feedburner.

GAconfig gives us some fields we need to fill in:

It then returns a piece of code which we can put in our RSS button.

We then have to go to Google Analytcis, go to “Goals”, create a new goal and fill in the details provided by GAConfig. After that we are ready to go, it is as simple as that.

It all is really easy to set up, even though it doesn’t exactly show you what to do after. You still have to know how to navigate through Google Analytics, but if you don’t, the site has several references to blogposts which describe how.

Measuring Facebook

An interesting one is measuring your Facebook page through GA. The numbers you get from Facebook are interesting, but it is not bad using GA to track some more. For that you have to add iFrames to your Facebook Page and put the code in there. As it happens, I just did some work on the Facebook page, so why not give it a try.

The first few steps are easy, filling in my Google Analytics account number, checking “Asynchronous Setup” and choosing whether or not I want to track referrers to my Facebook Tab. I then get a piece of code to put into my Facebook iFrame page.

I then have to set up a vanity page on my website which also gets a (different) code which GAConfig gave me and redirect that to the Facebook page. And off we go. I am curious to see what happens now!

Conclusions

The site has a lot of opportunities, because it can make things very easy for people. It does need some more explanation on some levels, but since its a free site you can hardly complain about that. Though improvements will witthout a doubt come on that level. Raven already indicated they plans for additional configurations.

Privacy

A question which is asked a lot these days: what about privacy issues? Raven says: “Security and privacy are not issues with GAConfig.com. The site does not store any data or require the creation of an account. ”

Whats in it for them?

Off course there is the question: why are they doing this, and for free? The answer is simple: they saw the need, but off course, if some of the people using the site would sign up to Raventools, that would be a nice benefit.

Personally, I like it. It definitely has potential.

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Written By
Bas van den Beld is an award winning Digital Marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. He is the founder of State of Digital and helps companies develop solid marketing strategies.
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