Tracking clicks over google analytics - google-analytics

Question

I want to track clicks with google analytics. Is there any tutorial for this?

Answer 1

I use the following jQuery code to add event tracking, assuming, that all external links begin with http://:
$(document).ready(function() {
$("a[#href^='http://']:not(.internal)").addClass("external").bind('click keypress', function(event) {
var code=event.charCode || event.keyCode;
if(!code || (code && code == 13)) {
if(pageTracker){
pageTracker._trackEvent('outgoing', 'click', this.href);
};
};
});

Answer 2

GA doesn't auto-track external links, so you have manually call one of its functions on all your exit links. You can track it as a virtual page view or as a custom variable or event, passing the relevant information you want to track, to the GA functions (like the exit link url).
Depending on how your links are setup, you can easily setup an click event listener to trigger the GA function call. For example, if all of the exit links have a specific css class attribute associated with them then you can hook the click event to that.
If all of your exit links point to your php script and only pass an ID number to it or something (no actual exit url), then you will not be able to pass to GA the exit link url. If you are fine with just passing the ID then you can use that instead of the url and pass as the virtual url or custom variable value "/exit/[id]" or whatever else makes sense to you. And you can also look for the php script's url as a way to hook the click event to all your exit links, if there is no other unique identifier.
If none of this is an option and you have to do it server-side...then you're kind of out of luck on doing it the "easy" way. GA has an API for interacting with it via server-side code but it's only 1-way. You can use it to get information out of GA but you can't use it to put information into it.
However, what you CAN do is...when a request to GA is made, take a look at that request in Firebug > NET tab or in Charles Proxy or some other request sniffer program, or take a look at the GA's url in its noscript tag. The way it works is a request is made to the GA server and variables and values are appended to the url as a query string.
So what you can do is build a url like that and use cURL to make a request to the GA server...but here's the tricky part: you have to fool GA into thinking the request was made from a browser, not your server. So you need to make sure you send header information with the cURL request to make it look like a browser made the request. Ideally you will want to use whatever header information was sent to your server from the client so that GA can record the hit as if it were the user, so that reports can populate accordingly.

Answer 3

You could send the requests to your server, and your server could send the user a 301 redirect.
Your could then do server-side google analytics, by sending requests to http://www.google-analytics.com/utm.gif to google, like this project does: http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/

Answer 4

You can use this jQuery library to help with sending click events to GA:
https://github.com/spilliton/track_that