Tracking Events in Google Analytics
Posted by jonathan at 6:26pm EST on 02/05/2009
From “Double Call” to “Single Call”
After the initial launch of event tracking, we realized that the two-step process of implementing event tracking in Analytics could be simplified to a single call using the _trackEvent() method. In the initial version of event tracking, your implementation involved two steps:
- Setting up the object to track and giving it a name
- Tracking actions, labels, and values on that object using myObjectName._trackEvent(action, label, value)
With the newer version of event tracking, released in spring of 2008, two important changes occurred:
- Simply use pageTracker._trackEvent() to create a named category and track actions, labels, and values in one step, not two
- The term Objects was changed to Categories to better reflect the concept of tracking a category of page elements, such as “Video Player”
So, for example, you could do something like this instead now,
pageTracker.trackEvent(“myVideos”, “Pause”, “Snoopy”);, which will lead to the same result as the double call before.
This will save time, space, and bandwidth for those extremely large sites, and for the smaller sites, it will just cause less headaches.
Please also note, you can track Flash Apps using Google Analytics, utilizing ActionScript 3.
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