Sean Walther’s Blog

Speed Up Google Analytics: Use Async

Saw a great post at High Performance Web Sites blog, Google Analytics goes async.  The author is Steve Souders, who works at Google on web performance.  So this is from the horses mouth.

Think about it, why would you care when the Google Analytics code is loaded?  All it does is capture data, as long as Google gets it — it may as well go out at midnight.  The new code enables an “async” request in HTML5. › Continue reading

Tags: Async, Asynchronous, Google, Google Analytics, Google Gears, HTML 5, HTML5, Steve Souders

How To: Track File Downloads with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is what most people use nowadays for web traffic reports.  It is flexible, powerful and simple.

The problem with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t analyze web traffic reports, but generates data in real time.  In most cases, this isn’t a problem.  In fact, it is big feature.  The problem is what about files that do not parse javascript such as PDFs, ZIP files, or other non-HTML documents.

When a user clicks on a PDF from your site, you will never see that PDF in Google Analytics.

How to track File downloads with Google Analytics
It’s very easy.  As is most things with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics provides a method for tracking anything you want.  It’s called “_trackPageview”.  

You use it in javascript as “pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/map’);”.

How does this help us track file downloads?  Simply modify the link to the file asset to have an “onClick”:

Link to the file here: <p>

<a href="somefile.pdf" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('somefile.pdf');">Download somefile.pdf</a>

</p>

See how easy that was?

Hopefully you have a function used to print out those links, then you can modify it in one place (that’s what I did).

You should see results in Google Analytics under Top Content shortly.

Tags: Analytics, Google Analytics, how to, Javascript, track, tracking, Tutorial, web traffic, web traffic report