Google Analytics

Tips and Tricks

Tracking Visitor Clicks, Outbound Links, and Non-HTML Files

As discussed at the beginning of this Short Cut, urchinTracker() creates pageviews. Because urchinTracker() is standard JavaScript, it can be added to any HTML event handler and thus executed whenever a visitor performs an action. Therefore, almost any visitor action can be captured as pageviews within Google Analytics.

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

<img src="/image.jpg" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/image.jpg');" />

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

<a href="/schedule.pdf" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker
('/files/pdf/schedule.pdf');" />PDF</a>

Tip

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 urchinTracker().

In the previous code example, I added /files/ to the value passed to urchinTracker(). 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.lunametrics.com" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/'+this.href);" />www.lunametrics.com</a> ...