Tracking More Than the Current Google Analytic's Package Grabs Eric Patterson

Last week I received a phone call from a client who wanted to know what percentage of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) visitors make up their total site visits. Unfortunately, the standard data that Google Analytics tracks was just grabbing browser type (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) and not the exact version of each browser. I could only tell them what percentage of visitors are using Internet Explorer and not the exact version. Being curious, and noticing that 70% of their visitors are using some version of IE, I asked them why. They told me their current web design firm will not make their newly reworked website IE6 compliant because in the general Internet statistics IE6 is less then 8%. Then, as I was talking to them I remembered being able to set my own variables for Google Analytics to track. It is through the use of custom variables (as Google calls them) that anything we can do in javascript (a client side browser scripting language) we can set and send up to the Google Analytic servers.

Why am I writing about this and wasting your time? I am writing about this because your tracking capabilities are almost endless with custom variables. In my above example, we can add some basic calls and find out what percentage of their current users are using IE6. Imagine the headaches and phone calls this simple solution just solved. What could of happen if they rolled out their new design and it wouldn't render properly or work for their IE6 customers and visitors? Well, it just so happen that they found out about the IE6 issues when testing their prototype site with their own employees and had a lot of phone calls from satellite offices. In this instance, we can add the code to set the custom variable and wait a few weeks, or a month, to make our own decision about whether to make the new site IE6 compliant from real data based on their visitors, not a general Internet statistic.

How else can we use the power of custom variables? One way to think about this is to look at how you might want to segment, or classify, your visitors. Maybe you have a members only section, and you want to know if members purchase more from your site then non members. Maybe you have a comments form or an email sign up form and want to know how those visitors who fill out a form compare to visitors who don't. We can just go on and on here, and you might not think of something right now but in future if you ever want to segment or track your visitors more then the standard Google Analytic's Package, then remember Custom Variables.