Google Analytics in Streamified for Image & Link Tracking

If you share a lot of content on your social networks, or if you’re serious about gaining an online following, you know how important is to have a way to track how your shared content performs. Who is clicking on your links, and in what countries? Which are your most popular images? 

When we set out to build analytics into Streamified, we aimed to help you answer exactly these questions. Rather than build our own analytics dashboard, though, we integrated a familiar solution right into Streamified: Google Analytics!

Setting Up Google Analytics with Streamified

Note: Google Analytics integration requires a Premium subscription or higher.

You can set up Google Analytics using a new or an existing Google Analytics account. Just log in to analytics.google.com and find your Google Analytics Account ID (which begins with “UA-” and contains numbers and dashes). As a blogger, for example, you might choose to use the same account ID that you use on your blog (to see your social analytics side-by-side with your blog’s analytics), or you might create a new one to keep the 2 sets of data separate. If you set up a new account, you can choose any domain name you wish when going through the setup process (such as http://streamified.me).

Once you have this account ID, just go to your Streamified Account Profile and paste the string into the field labeled ”Google Analytics UA” and then press “save.” 

You’re now ready to post!

Posting with Google Analytics Enabled

When you use any of our apps (web app, Android app, iPhone app, etc) and begin composing a post, you should have the ability to attach a link or an image. Once you do so, the Google Analytics switch will appear:




Remember: the analytics switch will only appear if you have attached an image or a link. If you attempt to turn it “on” without having supplied a Google Analytics UA (above, or without a Premium account) you will receive an error message.

Once you’ve enabled the Google Analytics switch, you can use the Post (or Schedule) button as normal.

Analyzing Analytics

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it is a great idea to spend some time getting to know the service. In particular, Streamified makes use of the Events feature, which you can learn more about here. Each time a visitor clicks on one of your links or images, a page view is logged, and a new event is created in your Google Analytics dashboard. 

The anatomy of a Streamified event in Google Analytics is as follows:

  • Event Category: “Streamified”
  • Event Action: “Link” or “Image”
  • Event Label: the specific URL linked to, or the URL of the image
As an example, here’s a screenshot of my Google Analytics account. Recently I shared a link to our newly-released Android application, as well as a link to a news story on Lifehacker:

 
Looking at this data, we can see that there were 7 clicks on my link to play.google.com link (to the Android app) and 1 click on the Lifehacker article. Of course, we could dig into this data a lot deeper and generate some really interesting reports, but there are plenty of good tutorials for Google Analytics out there already. With a little creative magic, you could easily use Google Analytics to create goal-funnels and track conversions of your links into sales, or other such cool feats ;)

As a final note, I’d like to return to what I said a minute ago about page tracking. Aside from creating an “event,” Streamified also creates a page view, like any other website integrated with Google Analytics. The primary difference is that page tracking records the actual Streamified shortened URL (eg, http://streamified.me/l/v7ofjtxi) instead of the destination URL (such as the URL you linked to).

Hopefully that’s enough to get you started with all the new Google Analytics features! If you have a question, drop us a line here or on our support site. 

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