Did that company visit your website? This is one way to find out.

  Categorized under: Web-Design-Articles

I was just asked how to tell using Google Analytics if someone visited your site and if so who. When you use use Google Analytics and you select one of your top pages and view it’s Content Detail you’ll find a third drop down that says “None.” If you change this to “Service Provider” it will show you who they used to get to that page.

But let’s say you wanted to find out if a specific company you sent your information to has visited your site or your page, here’s an easy way to figure that one out.

You will need some type of analytics running or some access to web server logs. If you don’t know if you have analytics or web server logs just ask your web host and hopefully they’ll be able to help.

So here’s the magic:
Just add a ?=companyName to the end of the URL

For instance if you were sending emails to your resume and you wanted to know if the company ever saw your link and you were using Google Analytics on your site you would use:
http://your-site.com/?=companyName

Now I can use my own servers weblog to find out if the link was ever clicked. In this example I look for the term “superfriends”.

Here’s the weblog using Textpattern

And here’s the weblog using getClick.com

So if you ever wonder if a company checked your site just add
sitename.com/?=holyCompanyName or something to identify the employer

Hope this helps your analytics. This is such an old trick, but it works. You just have to remember to add it to each place you post.

Also, if you want to see if someone links from mashable.com to your site, add http://zeusdidit.com/?=mashable (yes replace my site with yours)

— Zeus ::)
Aug 02, 2010