Google analytics and tracking new posts, new threads, registrations.

[doli]

Maybe some of you are more advanced in GA than me, and could help me.
I'd like to measure some things on my forum, but not sure how to do it:

1. Tracking new posts.
2. Tracking new threads.
3. Tracking registrations.
4. Tracking first posts.
5. Tracking first thread.

So I could better understand my users, where they ususally write first posts/first thread.
Where new users/returning users write to answer and where they like to start new threads.

I'm just started reading about web analytics, and it looks like these are good things to know.

cheers,
Marcin

[Brian Cummiskey]

Goals can be set for these things, but they will require a couple things that may feel is simply not possible.

1, you must have the 'thank you for ....' redirect messages enabled, as that will be your goal complete page and those templates will need to be modified to include the goal and GA code
2, you must disable all ajax features for these goals, especially quick reply, as the javascript for the goal will never be called correctly without a full page load.

Basically, you will need to give up functionality which is never a good thing. You can track posts and all that via vb statistics.
And for registrations, you can see here:
[HOW-TO] Setting up vBSEO's Registration Funnel in Google Analytics

[doli]

Ok, I understand it. Do you think it's possible to somehow use events to do it (maybe with goals)?
So user clicks send button, he start new post and something info is sent to GA, not sure what and how.

[Brian Cummiskey]

The problem is he may not post (hits back button/closes browser), or he may hit up to 3 buttons when starting in quick reply
(main reply to thread, post quick reply, go advanced).

There's really NO good way to track these things with a client side script like analytics without hard-coding things into the core vb ajax js scripts.

[doli]

I'm curious if vbseo is thinking about including more these analytics/tracking features in future vbseo releases ?

[Mert Gökçeimam]

Hello Marcin ,

What are the features you are interested in ?

[doli]

Well, I'm trying to start analysing my forum and here are the set of numbers I'd like to have (yesterday I set the goal for registrations, according to vbseo tip, so looks like I can have first three with no problem, but what about others?)

- number of new visits
- time spent on site by these new visits
- number of registrations / number of new visits

- number of new registrations with 1+ posts / number of new registrations
- number of active users / number of all registered users
- number of users with 1+ posts / number of registered users
- discussion temperature: number of new threads with 5+ posts / number of new threads

[Brian Cummiskey]

1 & 2 are already tracked by default in analytics.
3, with the goal set you can track this as well.

The other information, you can get from vb's built in logs and statistics or a basic db query.

Getting that information into analytics isn't really an option. Putting a goal for posting (or anything) simply won't happen because it would break features. You would need to disable anything with ajax. Quick reply, quick edit, and so forth, and you would need to enable all the 'thank you for posting' intermediate pages so that you can use that as the goal complete page.