How to Set Up a Segment to Track a Banner Ad With Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to track statistics for banner advertisements.

Google Analytics is a free service for website administrators that makes it possible to track site visitors in a variety of ways, including physical location, browser type and referral search queries. A basic setup of Google Analytics involves adding a snippet of code to each of your Web pages. If you want to track statistics for a specific banner advertisement on your site, you can modify the ad's link tag to create a Google Analytics segment for it.

Things You'll Need

• Google Analytics account

Instructions

1. Launch a Web editing application on your computer. You can use a dedicated program such as Adobe Dreamweaver or any text editor such as Notepad.

2. Open the HTML file that contains the banner advertisement for which you'd like to create a segment for in Google Analytics.

3. Locate the link element for the banner advertisement you want to track. The link element code should include "<a href=" followed by the URL for the page associated with the banner ad.

4. Place your text cursor after the quotation mark at the end of the associated page URL.

5. Add to the following to the end of the link code:

   "onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview ('/bannerads/advertisername/bannername');"

   Replace "advertisername" in the above example with the name of your advertiser and "bannername" with a custom name for the banner ad you are tracking. Google Analytics will use these names to label the banner ad segment in your reports and statistics.

6. Save the modified HTML page and upload it to your Web server. When visitors click on the banner advertisement, Google Analytics will collect data on it and place it in a separate segment within your profile.

References

• Google Support: How Do I Track Banner Ad Exits?