Tag Archives: Google Analytics

Unintentional load test

I’ve been a little out of touch with this blog in the last month or so. Ever since Thanksgiving things have been crazy, especially at work with the busy season.

Over the last year we have made some great efforts to dramatically increase our stability as well as availability by increasing redundancy to remove single points of failure. This was on many levels including the networking layer by introducing an HA firewall pair, and an HA load balancer pair. We also built out our server infrastructure by implementing 3 web servers for the load balancing, as well as clustering our database hardware and our application server hardware. All of this was intended to be able to easily handle the load of the retail busy season, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s weekend. To be able to really know how much we could handle we wanted to load test the infrastructure top to bottom. Continue reading Unintentional load test

Tracking Outbound Clicks – Part Two

Back in May I was looking for a way to track outbound clicks from my blog using Google Analytics Asynchronous code.  At the time there weren’t any WordPress plug-ins that were able to do this.  Last week I was setting up a new blog and found that there now is a plug-in that has this ability.

The plug-in is simply named Asynchronous Google Analytics for WordPress. It has few options and is really quite easy to setup.  It can be as simple as entering your Google Analytics ID, or you can modify advanced options if you wish.  Some of the options I found useful were turning off tracking for blog admins or segmenting logged in users.  I found it interesting that using the Asynchronous code was not turned on by default (since that is the name of the plug-in).

I’ve been using it for a couple of days and it seems to be working quite well.  Go check it out!

Tracking outbound clicks

Today I was looking at my Google Analytics statistics and found it interesting how people come to find my site.  The referral links from other sites are a decent traffic generator.  This got me wondering about how many people follow links on my pages out into the wild.

Naturally I started by searching the WordPress plug-in directory for something that sets this up for me.  I found many alternatives, but a few caught my eye right off.  Some plug-ins can track the outbound clicks via the Google Analytics infrastructure already in place. Continue reading Tracking outbound clicks