Yesterday I got an email asking about an article I wrote called “Tracking Conversions: Does Your Website Turn Suspects Into Prospects?“
I had talked about how to track Constant Contact subscriptions in Google Analytics…something difficult to do because the signup happens at Constant Contact's site, not yours.
The trick is in adding a piece of code to the signup form. (The same holds true for any outgoing link.) Basically, you set up an imaginary directory for your outgoing links and GA tracks these clicks as if they were going to that imaginary directory.
For the Constant Contact example, your opening line might look like this:
<form name=”ccoptin” action=”http://ui.constantcontact.com/d.jsp” target=”_blank” method=”post” onsubmit=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/example.com');”>
If you're using the older GA code it might look like this:
<form name=”ccoptin” action=”http://ui.constantcontact.com/d.jsp” target=”_blank” method=”post” onsubmit=”urchinTracker(‘newsletter/subscription');”>
How do you know if you're using the older or newer Google Analytics code? Find out here.