I’ve gotten a sudden increase in email sign-ups. They don’t appear to be spam. They’re all on my home page (https://hooshmand.net), using the standard Ghost opt-in, so i don’t know what is bringing these people to my blog. I track the source URL, and it’s all just the home page (not some post).
Context: Historically I got ~1 sign-up a day, and over the last week this leapt to 3-7 every day. I also want to know what I’m doing right, if anything. There has been no commensurate increase in traffic, page views to any specific page, increase in a specific source, changes to anything else actually, etc… I published one blog post but it hasn’t even received traffic yet.
Traditionally on GA to identify causes of things like this, I set up a “goal” on a destination page. This could be the “confirmed” page or the double opt-in page.
On Ghost, sign-ups are sent to /subscribe/. Where is this page generated? How can I manage its content? (and format, for that matter) I can’t see it in the hbs files. And most importantly: how can I set up GA to track opens of this page?
What I did: Set up goals for email sign-up to /subscribe (or /#subscribe), and got 0 data, both when testing it in GA, and when doing test sign-ups.
If it’s too beta for this… that’s fine. Let me know :)
If you have subscribers turned on in Labs then you can use a subscribers.hbs template in your theme if you wish - more info can be found in our theme docs.
As far as I know, setting up a destination goal on the /subscribe/ page should work so long as the GA tracking code is present across your entire site. Though, this would only really let you know how many times your goal was hit, and wouldn’t necessarily give you reliable reverse goal path information - that’s just the nature of GA in 2019!
You could also check out the Behaviour Flow report in GA. This might give an indication as to how people are moving through your site and ending up on the /subscribe/ route.
Since you mentioned most of the subscriptions are probably coming from the home page, you could also check the following:
Go to Behaviour > Site Content > All pages
Your homepage is probably the top listed page, click on it
Add a secondary dimension of Source / Medium
This should give you an indication if you’re getting referral traffic from specific domains, as well as how much traffic is organic or direct. You can repeat this process with other popular pages on your site.
Other than that, you might be interested in some of the other Analytics tools that we have in our integrations library. I personally like using Amplitude
As you mentioned, the subscribers feature is still experimental at the moment - so it’s worth keeping an eye out for future updates :)
Thanks @Kym that’s very helpful. The goal on GA didn’t work, btw, that’s why I’m here. I tried it a few ways. and the tracking code is site-wide (i get all other site-wide info).
Thanks for the tip on behaviour flow… and also for the suggestion to make a subscribers.hbs template, I will do that!
And I looked at Amplitude and got awed and a little scared… wow. I appreciate the tip.
Hmm… I just had a look at hooshmand.net/subscribe and can’t see the tracking code. I think since subscribers is experimental, it’s probably not including your GA tracking code from site-wide code injection. So, if you do create a subscribe.hbs template file, you can add your GA script in there. See if that works
No problem for the Amplitude tip - it’s a really powerful tool!
