You can do what Google call Cross-Domain tracking if you have some control over what is put on the external site.

Otherwise I think you would need to have the external site call a cgi script on your server which then returned the tracking image rather than call the tracking image directly, you could then put some tracking code in the script. This is the way that businesses like DoubleClick do it.

I am no expert in this sort of thing so I could be completely wrong, I would be interested to hear how you solve the problem.

Regards
Mark

eg: my site is http://www.mysite.com.
I create a blank gif image and upload to my site and say I name it:
http://www.mysite.com/trackingimage.gif

Then on an external site I am promoting, on the ‘thankyou’ page (conversion page) I have this:

img src=”www.mysite.com/trackingimage.gif” alt=”” width=”1? height=”1?

Would there be some way to check Google Analytics to see how many times it was loaded plus track which keywords lead to it been triggered?

Or is there some other code I could add to the above image like my UA-XXXXXX-XX number to get this information?

Thanks for your time, kind regards, Ian

Of course you should be able to see the file access in old fashioned web server logs but that isn’t as convenient or as reliable as proper analytics. If the PDF file has been cached somewhere then you won’t see any hit on your own server.

What you really need to do is embed the javascript for Google Analytics within the PDF file, so when somebody opens the file it invokes GA to log it for you.
I think this might be possible using something like javascript for acrobat but I don’t know.

Also there may be security problems, it is one thing invoking javascript when browsing the web but quite another if a downloaded document does it to talk to a remote site every time you open a document.

If somebody has a proper solution to this problem I’d love to see it.

I would edit the
pageTracker._trackPageview(’www.leehughes.co.uk/feed.xml’)
to just say
pageTracker._trackPageview(’/feed.xml’)

And I would move the google analytics code to just under the opening body tag, for this purpose it needs to be above where you call it. Don’t duplicate the code, just move it, it should still work ok.

That is one major expedition you have planned, good luck!

A late edit to answer the rest of your questions;

To view your stats go into Google Analytics and drill down from Content Overview (click on view report) you should find an entry for /feed.xml which will show you how many people clicked on your RSS button.

You can add the javascript call to any link but don’t add it to anything where the destination already has the google analytics code in it or you will be double counting. It is best reserved for links where you can’t include google analytics code in the destination file, that is external links or links to things like xml and pdf files.

am new to the whole web design thing. Am looking for a way to track rss subscription. Will this provide that?
From my (limited) understanding I just apply what you said above to my rss feed link? (am creating my own).

I put my google code right at the bottom of my page (as suggested) will putting another code in affect my results in any way? Or is it the same code? Does putting it where you suggest make any difference to the normal tracking?

The code you provided

I have to apply this to every link that I want to track?

How do I view the results in Google Analytics?

Thanks, sorry for all the questions I just wanted to get it straight in my head

If you are wanting to record clicks in your own MySQL database as well as using Google Analytics then I think you would need to replace the onclick call to pageTracker._trackPageview with a call to your own javascript routine which first wrote a record to your MySQL database and then called pageTracker._trackPageview
But I think this might get a bit messy as Javascript runs on the client and MySQL runs on the server, getting it working smoothly might be difficult.

Or you could go into Google Analytics and export the data from there. I think you can get Analytics to export data to a CSV file or something similar which you could then read with a simple program and store in your MySQL database. You can get Analytics to automatically email you a file each day/week/month or whatever suits your purpose.

I haven’t tried either of these methods so don’t assume that I really know what I’m talking about but I hope this answer helps. Or have I totally misinterepreted your question?