Google Analytics Tracking of Jetpack (Sharedaddy) Social Engagement

Google recently added social engagement tracking to its analytics suite. With a little bit of leg work, Google Analytics can track not only +1s, but also Facebook and Twitter shares via a simple _gaq.push call.

If your site uses WordPress’s Jetpack plugin with Sharedaddy, and you already have Google Analytics up and running, you can use jQuery to attach the virtual event to the share button.

To add Google Analytics to Sharedaddy’s Twitter share button:

$('a.share-twitter').click( function() {
_gaq.push( ['_trackSocial', 'twitter', 'share',
$(this).attr('href').substr(0, $(this).attr('href').indexOf('?'))]);
});

…and for Facebook:

$('a.share-facebook').click( function() {
_gaq.push( ['_trackSocial', 'faceboook', 'share',
$(this).attr('href').substr(0, $(this).attr('href').indexOf('?'))]);
});

The above code simply listens for the share button to be clicked, and if so, passes the target URL back to Google, along with the service’s name. Putting it all together into a plugin with a hook to wp_head wp_footer you get the full plugin code available as a GitHub Gist.

The code should work out of the box with the standard share buttons (seen below), but can easily be adapted with a few minor modifications to apply to like and other iterations of the social media icons.

More details on the tracking code can be found over in the Google Analytics Social Engagement Documentation. Improve the code to work with your site? Feel free to fork the gist and contribute it back.