Click Through Rates on Web Stories with New Analytics

@mattatnicolebarkerva Thank you for posting your topic. Although the new story auto analytics doesn’t have specific events for attachment clicks, you can probably achieve this by adding UTM parameters to your links that can be tracked on your main website. Please refer to this article for how to add parameters to URLs.

Thank you for the response Luckyna.

So are you saying that there is no way to track click-through rates for web stories with the current release without creating UTM codes to track internal site links?

That seems like a large step backward. I can’t understand why Google would remove the one way we had to track Web Story effectiveness. Web Stories on their own produce so little revenue (like tens of dollars in ad revenue). The only way to get an ROI on them is via a clickthrough rate to an article or sale. It’s fundamental to Stories. Is there no other way to track this than to manually add UTM code to every link I put in a multi-slide story?

Matt

As per the documentation page you shared in your original topic, we’ve greatly simplified the amount of events being tracked for stories because the original configuration was way too overwhelming for users.

Options like UTM parameters, referrers and customized analytics configurations still allow you to track this kind of engagement if desired.

Since you have used specifically story_page_attachment_enter in the past and it sounds like you would like to continue using that event, I have created a small plugin for you to bring it back.

You can download that plugin as a ZIP file and upload it to your WordPress site & activate it there. Just change your GA ID and the story_page_attachment_enter event should continue to work.

Hi Pascal.

Haha…that’s an amazing level of support!!! We have many clients that use your plugin and have created well over 3,000 stories for them using your tools. Many have been around for a while and so it would seem that they can still use the event triggers (until they click the upgrade button?). Going forward though, I will give the small plugin you created a try and let you know if we experience any issues.

Just from a feedback perspective, there is a lot of misinformation out there about click throughs from the web story to the actual article. The analytics would lead people to believe they are receiving thousands of “clicks” to their site, but their ad revenue never goes up because their GA stats aren’t representative of actual traffic to a revenue producing page. It is very confusing with no one really having many answers as to how to track things without creating more complications with UTM parameters. We stumbled on the story_page_attachment_enter event which seemed to be a reliable way.

Just for consideration, if your team could find a simplified way to help users distinguish between clicks on a web story slide and actual traffic the web story brought as a referring page to an article, the community would be very appreciative. Maybe consider placing the story_page_attachment_enter and story_click_through events back into the available events?

Thank you again for your extended support. Your team is very responsive and I certainly appreciate it!

@swissspidy

Sorry to bother you with one more comment here. I tried the following

Using plugin version 1.19.0
1. Verified the events I wanted were coming through with the legacy settings.
2. “Migrated the DB” using the button on the plugin dashboard
3. Verified the events I wanted were no longer coming through
3. Opened the PHP file you provided and changed the tracking code.
4. Zipped the newly saved file
5. Uploaded, installed, and activated the new custom tracking plugin
6. Cleared browser cache

I tried other minor things as well to try to get the events to fire again, but I’m having no luck. Any ideas on other things I need to do to get the custom events to fire?

Here is the story I am testing on.

Thanks for testing the provided PHP file!

I just noticed there’s a small bug in the configuration there that I fixed now.

If you could grab the latest version from https://gist.github.com/swissspidy/215bd5ab6ef93b548a93596d2aefe9b2, the events should start flowing in again.

Maybe consider placing the story_page_attachment_enter and story_click_through events back into the available events?

Noted! I just filed a feature request to add these directly to the new enhanced analytics configuration (called “amp-story-auto-analytics”). We’ll also look into potentially incorporating that “mini-plugin” I shared into the Web Stories plugin.

@swissspidy

Amazing! I just tested and everything is working as expected. I really can’t thank you enough.

I’ll keep my eye on future releases, but it’s great to know we have this patch to solve the issue. Amazing level of support!

@mattatnicolebarkerva Thanks for confirming everything is now working as expected for you and glad to hear you’re happy with the level of support. I will mark this topic as resolved but do feel free to reach out to us again if you have any further issues or questions and we will be happy to help!