Analytics - Tracking actions per user
One of our customers has a web application that requires login, and they would like to get Google Analytics to track it per user - to know which users came to their site.
From what I read on Google forums, Google doesn't support such tracking.
I was wondering:
a) Do I understand correctly that Google doesn't support that?
b) Does anyone know of a analytics tool that does support such action? The only one I've found was Pmetrics (which is Clicky??), but I would like to have something to compare it to, or if someone who uses this feature on Clicky/Pmetrics could tell me how well it works (there's no demo for this feature on their site)
Answer
Not 100% sure, but I suspect you could use the Custom Variables feature of GA and create very granular variables to track on. Whilst I think you could probably implement some code as per below (modified from the google examples), I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a good idea.
pageTracker._setCustomVar(
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1
"MemberID", // The name of the custom variable
"12345678", // The member id value, could read from a query param
1 // Sets the scope to visitor-level
);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
As I said though, definitely consider whether it is valuable tracking individuals in such granularity - considering privacy and practical reporting considerations.