Google Analytics

Chapter 4. Tracking Visitor Clicks, Outbound Links, and Non-HTML Files

The simple implementation for tracking visitor actions, or clicks, involves adding the _trackPageview() function to an HTML tag. For example, to track a visitor click on an image, just add _trackPageview() to the onclick event of that element:

<img src="/image.jpg" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/image.jpg']);" />

When a visitor clicks on the above image, a pageview will be created for /image.jpg. You can also use this method to track non-HTML files:

<a href="/schedule.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
    '/vpv/downloads/pdf/schedule.pdf']);" />PDF</a>

When creating pageviews for non-HTML files, try to use a consistent naming convention. This will make it easier to identify them in the reporting interface. For example, you may want to create a virtual directory structure using _trackPageview().

In the previous code example, I added /vpv/downloads/pdf/ to the value passed to _trackPageview() (vpv stands for “virtual pageview”). This makes it easy to identify the non-HTML files in the reports.

Outbound links are tracked in the same manner:

<a href="http://www.cutroni.com" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
    '/vpv/outbound/'+this.href]);" />www.cutroni.com</a>

This outbound link will appear as /vpv/outbound/http://www.cutroni.com in the reports. Again, be logical in your naming convention. By placing all outbound links in the /vpv/outbound/ directory, you can easily filter the data in the Top Content report ...