: Using GA to track popular tags/categories in WordPress I coordinate a few editorial content-driven websites that are built in WordPress. Most make heavy use of tags, categories and custom taxonomies.

@Mendez628

Posted in: #Analytics #GoogleAnalytics #Wordpress

I coordinate a few editorial content-driven websites that are built in WordPress. Most make heavy use of tags, categories and custom taxonomies. I'd love to track which tags/categories are most popular, retain visitors, etc. Not just the navigation pages, but also the posts themselves.

For example, I'd like to know if posts in the category 'sweepstake' are more popular than others. Currently, the only way for me to do that is to generalize based on the category overview or to manually tally all the individual post data. We've experimented with using keywords in post titles and using custom post types, but that's too limiting.

By default, this kind of WP-specific tracking is hard to do in GA. A post has a url that does not feature categories or tags in it. Given the fact that a post can belong to several taxonomy terms, this makes sense. It would also be bad SEO if a post's url would change by simply changing/renaming its tags.

So, I was wondering if it would be feasible to use GA events for this. Would it be possible/sensible to trigger an event for each taxonomy term assigned to a post? Or is that a sick and twisted way to use GA events?

I've already tried Wordpress's own Jetpack statistics, but they are way too crude and unreliable. Other stats tools/plugins also don't seem to cut it. GA has the huge advantage of being generally very flexible and most of our (new) editors have used it before, know what it is and don't need a lot of training to get basic intel out of it.

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