By Mark Stephenson, Head of Technology at evvnt
As a company that prides itself on providing a high return on investment, it’s natural that we’re keen to be as precise as possible when it comes to tracking click throughs to booking or registration pages. A number of our savvy customers regularly point out some differences between the numbers tracked by ourselves, and the number that they glean from their Google Analytics account. Below I have listed a few of the areas to give attention to when setting up both your Google and evvnt campaigns.
1. The link
Ensure the primary URL that you want evvnt to promote carries the relevant Google campaign tracking parameters. For example: instead of using www.myevent.com, you would use
www.myevent.com/utm_source=evvnt&utm_medium=listing&utm_content=event1&utm_campaign=moreAttendees
I’d suggest that all events given to us for distribution have explicit campaign tracking code added to them. If it sounds like I’m speaking in another language then you should check out this Google Analytics article which gives you all the information you need and also has a convenient link builder. Clicks for individual events can now be monitored separately. This is important for a step I’ll outline further down.
2. Client vs server
Google Analytics works by waiting until a page has loaded, then fires a web request to the Google server to log the view. If the page doesn’t fully load, or the user leaves before the request is sent or received, then the view would never be registered. In contrast the atnd.it system uses full page redirect to register the click. In other words, when someone clicks an atnd.it link the first thing that happens is a link click is logged and then it shows the user a page.
3. Browser security
Depending on a number of factors, the browser itself may block a click from registering with Google. Cookies and Javascript are often blocked for security and certain installations of Google Analytics require one or both to be allowed. Users with enhanced security are likely not to have the data registered.
4. WordPress / routing
I’ve seen some cases of wordpress or other CMSs actually stripping campaign stats from click traffic due to internal ‘rewrite’ routing rules (quite a mouthful). Basically the page you think you are looking at is actually internally something else and that can get confusing. If you are using a campaign URL (see point 1) then you can test this yourself by clicking the link and viewing the “realtime” section of Google Analytics to see if there are any viewers for that campaign.
If you are using evvnt, and would like me to look further into your analytics then please comment down below and we’ll get back to you.
“Image source – Flickr, usage under Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)”