A lot of site owners want to track outbound links so they can see how often they are clicked. It's also useful to see when and where people left your site. Google Analytics knows the exit time of your last page, where in normal cases the last visited page is not counted in the spend time on site/page.

But, there is a big but. A lot of outbound link tracking is done like this:

<a href="http://andrescholten.net" onclick="trackClick(this)">Nice site</a>

And this is what happens when you click on this outbound link:

1. The onclick is executed first
2. The trackClick function generates an IMG element with a URL that points to the Web Analytics vendor
3. The onclick function is handled and the browser starts with the href part

And then the race starts:
Read more: Tracking outbound links? I bet you only measure 70 percent »

Since the start of the new Google Analytics version (V5) we're unable to export more than 500 rows to for instance Excel. I figured there must be a solution to raise that number to 10.000 or more, so I started coding.

In the old Google Analytics there was the "&limit=10000" parameter that you could add to the export URL. In the new interface you can select the amount of rows below the table:

And after everything is loaded you can export those 500 with the usual export button.
Read more: How to export more than 500 rows in new Google Analytics interface »

With the new release of ga.js this is possible. In the old days a fired event immediately after a trackPageview would cause Google Analytics to report a 0% bouncerate for that visit. But sometimes you don't want that behavior because the event is not always triggered by the visitor.

For instance: I track page load times the same way Google Analytics does, but in an unsampled way (Google only meausures 10%). To do that I fire an event immediately after the trackPageview, but I do that in another profile with a different UA-XXXX-Y number so it won't affect my bouncerates. But now we have an extra parameter:

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

If you set this opt_noninteraction (boolean) to true it wil not affect bouncerates!!! That makes it possible to:
Read more: Google Analytics event tracking not affecting bouncerate? »

I can't believe it. Google just announced a new 'feature' for their search results pages. If a user is logged in he will be redirected to the secure (SSL) version of their search engine. The main reason (so they claim) is the user's privacy... when a user does a search and navigates to a site, that site will only be able to see it's a visitor from Google Organic...yes, without the keyword.

Why does this suck?

• If Google really had a clear focus on a user's privacy they also wouldn't send the keyword along with an AdWords click (as Yoast tweets). Right now only half of the results are privacy-protected and the other (paid) half not.
• Google claims it will not affect a lot of users, that could be right on average. But for some sites a lot of their target groups are logged in to their Google Analytics, Google Reader, Youtube, Gmail, etc. All those visitors will also be logged in on the search results, and that could mean serious loss of information about the used keywords.

Read more: Google starts hiding SEO keywords for privacy, but AdWords unaffected? »

Have you ever launched a multi-variate test with the Visual Website Optimizer. And did you want to review all the variants in the test in all browsers? Or do you want to analyze all the variants another site is testing when you see a VWO test being executed? I bring you the magic With my new VWO-Variant-Switcher© it's easy to view all variants.

How does it work

In the toolbars of all my browsers I have this little button:

When I click on it when I'm on a page that is running a live test this popup shows up:

Read more: Live Visual Website Optimizer variant switcher »