I’m excited to announce a new plugin called NG Events.
This is an essential plugin for anyone who uses the NextGEN Gallery plugin on their WordPress website. It allows you to see which images are getting clicked using Google Analytic’s Event Tracking feature. What is the NextGEN Gallery plugin?
NextGEN Gallery is one of the leading image gallery management plugins for WordPress. It’s been around since 2007 and is owned by Imagely. NextGEN Gallery is easy enough for simple photo galleries, but powerful enough for the most demanding photographers, visual artists, and imaging professionals. It has over 800,000 downloads for the free version and has extra features available within the premium version.
I use NextGEN Gallery on many of my websites. One of the websites has over 2 gigs of images and the plugin does an excellent job of managing those images.
I love that the plugin can carry its weight. It also works well on multisites!
Do you really need image tracking?
A few months back, I was in Google Analytics doing some research on one of my image gallery sites to see which pages were getting the most visits. As I went about my reporting, I asked myself…
“I wonder which images are getting clicked?”
This was a big deal on my image sites and I needed a solution.
My site has over 2 gigs of images within the galleries and I had no idea which images were getting clicked.
I had no visibility into what galleries needed more images. Or which galleries were my top performers…that could be extremely beneficial for anyone using NextGEN Gallery.
The best option I found was to install Google Analytics Event Tracking for the NextGEN Gallery images.
There was a couple ways to go about this though.
I use Google Tag Manager on my sites to track my site’s performoance. But I have other sites that use the traditional Google Analytics tracking code provided by GA.
So I decided to create a plugin that adds the image tracking feature into the NextGEN Gallery images dynamically.
Introducing NG Events
NG Events is a plugin that enables Google Analytics Event Tracking code on all your NextGEN Gallery images allowing you to track which NextGEN Gallery images are clicked.
NG Events Settings Page in WordPress
NG Events allows you to choose which tracking method you want to use – Google Analytics tracking code or Google Tag Manager (GTM requires additional details to work – visit plugin page for more on this).
It also an option so that you can choose to load the script globally on your site, on a category page, or on every child page of a parent page (which is how I have it setup).
I included an optional NextGEN Gallery class definition field. I’ve noticed some plugin installs use a different class name so I wanted to have an option in case I ever encounter this type of scenario.
This plugin has given me full enhanced insight into all my image galleries which I’ve never had until now. I know which images my members are clicking on, which image galleries to build, and which images to showcase on social media and through email.
To learn more or to buy this plugin, click here to visit the NG Events plugin page.
