Reid Dossinger

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site. There's documentation on the AddThis site for adding URL parameters , but here's how I modified it to incorporate the Analytics code. In the AddThis code where you call javascript that powers the widget (s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js), add this in: <script type="text/javascript"> var addthis_share = { url_transforms : { add: { utm_campaign: 'AddThis', utm_source: '{{code}}', utm_medium: 'share' } } } <script> The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie "delicious", "googlereader", etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters. You're just adding in the st...

How many people you think they got working on that Feedburner thing over there? One? Half? A summer intern? A guy who works on it while he watches football? The flaws and problems with Feedburner have been frustrating to say the least, so I was pretty damn excited when, a little over a month ago, Feedburner finally announced that they were integrating the ability to add in Google Analytics campaign data to the end of feed item URLs. This was huge. Before this, you had to add in the string into the original RSS feed, which most of us couldn't do since we didn't have access to that original feed, but wanted to track when people were coming from our feeds. My excitement ended, though, when I cranked up the feature and saw what it did to my stats. Yes, it was helpful to see who came from Google Reader or Bloglines, but if the content was syndicated, it stripped out the referrer. This was a problem with my music blog . Hype Machine is by far and away our #1 referrer, and when I imp...