tracking virtual links with google analytics

jens — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:57:00 +0000

Tracking dynamic sites is sometimes a bit tricky. Typically tracking systems are specialized in tracking page views. More sophisticated system have there own way of tracking custom event (like shown here).
Unfortunately I needed to track clicks on a HTML canvas. To make these clicks visible to a tracking system, I wanted to transform each click to virtual URL. That way I could use Google analytics not only for tracking but also for popularity statistics of certain content.
The script for doing so is actually pretty simple.

function trace(url){
var tracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
tracker._trackPageview(url);
}

Now every time I need to track something I call this function with a custom build URL.

underdog-blog » google analytics

tracking virtual links with google analytics