Tracking Clicks with Google Analytics Pt. 0
March 13, 2007 by Justin Cutroni 
Have you ever wondered what people click on when they get to your website? I don’t mean which links, I mean which elements. Do they get confused and think that an image is a link and try to click on it? Which outbound links do they click on? I know this may seem like a strange topic, but I am headed somewhere :)
Using Google Analytics we can actually track every single click that a visitor makes. It doesn’t matter what they click on, we can track it. This functionality is great for tracking clicks on:
- non-html pages (mp3, pdf, exe, etc.)
- links to other sites
- form elements
There is some instruction in the GA help docs, but I’m going to dive deep into this topic during during three blog posts.
In the first part of this series I’ll discuss the technology that Google Analytics uses to tracks clicks. I’ll explain (in painful detail :) ) how it works and what it does.
Once we know how GA tracks clicks, I’ll walk through a basic implementation. I’ll show you how to track non-HTML files, clicks on outbound links and clicks on almost any element of your web page.
Part 3: Advanced Implementation
Finally, in Part 3 I’ll give you guys the framework to avoid everything I discuss in Part 2. :)
If you have any specific questions about this topic post them below and I’ll try to cover them in the upcoming posts.
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