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March 13, 2008

Traffic Stats for Your Google Documents

My wish to have traffic stats for user generated content hosted by Google is partly fulfilled. Google Docs has a new option to track published documents using Google Analytics. You need to go to the Settings page, enable the tracking option and add a Google Analytics profile ID. It's not clear whether you need to create a new profile or use an existing one, but both options might work.


After publishing a document, you'll see a small message: "Tracking visitor traffic with Google Analytics."


The screenshot below shows the source code of a published document: the first Google Analytics tracking code is used by Google, while the second tracking code is associated with your account.


The other hosted Google service that allows you to add Google Analytics code is Project Hosting. It's also easy to add the tracking code if you develop iGoogle gadgets.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Update: The option is no longer available in the settings, but even when it was available you couldn't use it because the Analytics code was broken. Hopefully, Google will fix the problem soon.

5 comments:

  1. The option Tracking visitor traffic with Google Analytics. View traffic stats currently only appears in published text documents. Published spreadsheets and presentations are not (yet?) tracked :(

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  2. I'm not seeing this. Is it being rolled out so that not everyone has it yet?

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  3. The option is no longer available in the settings, but even when it was available you couldn't use it because the Analytics code was broken. Hopefully they'll fix the problem and the option will reappear soon.

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  4. I will love to see this rolled out to their Hosted Google Apps suite. Google Sites is very promising, but the inability to track detailed usage makes it somewhat unattractive.

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  5. My Google Docs Setting page doesn't show "Traffic Stas" option...

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