Does Google Analytics (Or Any Analytics) Track 301 Redirects?

I'm looking at google analytics after redirecting www to no-www and also changing the permalink structure in wordpress and I've noticed a drop in traffic. Most of the drop is from Direct traffic which is 63% while others are in the single digits.

In the Visitor Flow section its showing 100% drop for some pages with the old permalink structure which was similar to but if I visit the URL that is reported as 0 traffic today the redirect is fine and crawling the page with Screaming Frog its redirecting with a 301. When I check the Real Time section I see that users are also finding the page there fine.

So is this because Google Analytics does not track redirects? Is there a way to?

newyorkcity,

I can for sure say Google Analytics (and most likely other tracking software) does not track 301 redirects. Note that this is true for server-side redirects (301 or 302) because the browser never sees the redirecting domain. So if you get a visitor from a link in an SERP, the referrer will show up as that particular search engine. If it comes from another website, it will show up in reports as that site.

This thread goes a little more in depth,

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/KQ2RPsLR35Y

Hope that helps,

Shawn

only serverside tracking can track 301 redirects ( that is tracking installed on the server hosting the code - or in the code itself ) the analytics code is inserted in the page after the 301 are processed and because of that, it can not track them

thanks for the replies! Helps me out a lot!

Is there any good serverside tracking I could use for wordpress to track the redirects?

GA cannot track 301 redirects. Use any cloaking plugin with WP to do the redirect. With that you can track the redirects.