Tracking IE9 Site Mode Launches with Google Analytics

  • Article

So you’ve taken the five minutes to add an Internet Explorer 9 Site Mode for your website so that it has a great Windows experience (see blog post here).  Now you want to track if your visitors are pinning your site – this would be a major indication of affinity for your site and and visitor engagement.  One easy way to do this is by adding query parameters to the meta tags that specify the startup URL and the tasks.  If you are using Google Analytics, you can use their URL Builder tool to generate the URL query paramters that you just put into the meta tags.  Other web analytics services also track query parameters so you can do a similar process for them as well.

<meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="https://charette.com/?utm_source=windows&utm_medium=sitemode&utm_campaign=IE9" />

You could also specify a completely different base URL and have that go to its own landing page.  See the end result here on my personal site, Charette.com:

  1. Launch the website https://charette.com in Internet Explorer 9 Beta
  2. Drag the “The Charette Project” tab to your Windows Vista or Windows 7 task bar
  3. The site is now pinned to your task bar