Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Analytics doesn't display overview pages properly

Strange day with many errors. Here's another one found at  google analytics (no editing outside of resize used)

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Youtube.com Unable to Edit Videos - functionality unavailable

When trying to edit youtube videos we are met with this "Oops something went wrong" error message "This functionality is currently unavailable. Please try again later."



If anyone has information about when this will become available please post a comment below!

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Get contact info with custom analytics to database

Had a need to get more details about the contacts leads (contact us page) and created this custom analytics that might be interesting for someone out there.

This code is valuable and I will not release it to the public unless there's huge demand for it but I will explain what is going into building it.

First there is the usual database connections but some tricks required to create multiple connections, which can work for off-site and different hosts (outside of the current one) - this is mainly done for backup but also because the internal website software managing the leads is on a separate host (done mainly because it's heavy enough to slow down the public site).

Next we have the part that tracks the landing page along with medium, browser and OS (inspired by Google analytics), I use a cookie that expires after about a month.

The data is stored in a table, database dedicated for this (specially since an avarage traffic site will gain a few thousands of new visitors per month/few weeks) the table will grow pretty rapidly and clean up can be scheduled for older entries that are over a month, but overall mysql can take a lot of entries and I didn't have to do that yet without seeing any slowdown (we are on a VPS mind you).

This part translates to getting a line of code at the top of every page you want tracked and it will have to be converted to php (if it isn't already) but it's easy for CMS type software like wordpress since it's as simple as going to the index and adding it to the top.

Finally the code needs to be added to the contact us page when being submitted. This will vary depending on your method of contact page if it's custom or if it's CMS type like wordpress plugin, specifically the popular "contact form 7" explanation can be found here.

The result is receiving leads in specific software which helps keeping track, and following up to convert (this is also software I have built) and when you get the lead it will have keywords, medium (referral, google or other search, or direct hit - just like google analytics). Helping you figure out how people find you and investing in the good methods that convert into real money for your business.

And that should do it for the brief, if you have interest in this software or even in my help setting it up for you please let me know in the comments, by email (found at the bottom) and we can talk something out.

Contact Form 7 send contact to database

UPDATE: Aug, 2016 -  There's a better solution using an add-on plugin for wordpress.



For archive purpose:

I noticed since Sept 23, 2014 (but maybe the change was made earlier since we didn't update the plugin until now) There are structure and code changes made in the new version which means this will not work. If you don't see the classes.php file you know you have the newer version (4.0 for me). New solution: modify the contact-form.php file around line 560 after:
if ( $submission->is( 'mail_sent' ) ) {
if ( $this->in_demo_mode() ) {
$result['status'] = 'demo_mode';
}
add:
require_once (getcwd().'/wsdl/func.php');
webRequest2($submission->get_posted_data());

on your own code you might need to add [0] at the end of the array fetching for each field.


Otherwise if you have an older version read the original solution:

If you use the quick form creation on wordpress with the popular Contact Form 7 while sending the data (not only to email) to a database of your CRM or related software to help manage the leads, this should help.

Although I am aware of the database extension I couldn't spend time to figure it out because we already had a database solution from a custom site that didn't use wordpress prior, so it was very simple once I found where the data is being sent:

Found the location in our install to be under /your-domain/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/classes.php

In this file you edit the part which is around line 278 in the submit function under the code
} elseif ( $this->mail() ) {

add your code, in my case it's two lines:
$cid=webRequest2($this->setup_posted_data());
sendAnalytics($cid);

I covered more on the analytics software here.

As simple as this you have the data and can send it to your database (which could and probably should be on different host).

Let me know what you think!