Sometimes it becomes really important to know that how engaging a WordPress Plugin is, in terms of engagement. Some of the common engagement criteria are bounce rate, avg. session duration, pages/ session etc. For the same purpose, I Installed the Inline related posts plugin on my WordPress Website. So that the plugin could generate some additional traffic by showing Also Read relevant links on each of my posts.
Well, I was able to install the plugin but I was unable to measure the performance of this plugin. Was that Plugin a really helpful plugin for me or it was just a plugin which I had trusted. Anyways, so to measure the performance of this plugin called Inline related post, I segregated the entire traffic being generated by this plugin into a separate channel in Google Analytics. I named that channel as Internal traffic. I did all of this just to measure the performance of this plugin and decide on its helpfulness.
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Setting GA Variable Field with Source & Medium to Filter Traffic
The first thing I did was I filtered the internal traffic being generated by this plugin called Inline Related Post using campaign medium and source. Once If I was able to do it, Google Analytics was going to consider all the traffic being generated by Also read links from this plugin as a link click on some campaign. Follow the steps below to set the field in Google Analytics.
Create a New GA Variable in GTM
Just like you would create a GA variable for Universal Analytics purpose, create another GA variable with the following settings:
- Variable Type as Google Analytics Settings
- In the Fields, you can put the source and medium as per your choice. It’s the same as UTM tags.
Trigger for Click on Also Read links
Now you need to create a trigger. This trigger is basically a trigger which trigs on when someone clicks on the Also Read link.
I have selected the trigger type as Link clicks as shown above. Besides, Inline related posts plugin just works on posts so, I used regex matching to match all of my single posts based on the permalink (I know regex is set not proper above.)
I used the regex above because my posts have the permalink structure of wesitename.com/year/month/post-title. So, I am just trying to match the 20** here. Apart from that, I am also tracking all the link clicks where click text says Also Read. Yours can be little different depending upon what you have put in the WordPress.
If you want to know more about I tracked the Inline Related Posts for my blog, here is the blog on how to track inline related link clicks on WordPress
Tag For Traffic with Source & Medium
You have to create another tag just like Google Analytics/ Universal Analytics tag but this tag is just going to have the GA variable which we created in the beginning. Refer the picture below and select the trigger associated with this tag from the previous step.
Create a new Channel Grouping in GA admin
You need to have the basic concept of channel grouping here. You can create a channel grouping by going under Channel Setting under views in Google Analytics Admin as shown below:
Create Custom Channel for Internal traffic
You need to define a custom channel to track all the internal traffic in GA based on some rules. Refer the picture below:
Here I have named a channel as Internal traffic – Also read. GA is going to segregate the traffic based on the rule that I have defined. The rule here is segregating the traffic based on the source and medium which we had defined during the GA variable creation in the first step. This traffic will be going through the channel named as above.
Test Live
Now Click some links from that Plugin and see in the real-time in GA.
You can see the traffic sources. AlsoRead from Inline related posts and medium as internal has also been listed in the real time. That means our implementation is working successfully.