Convert2Media

Recently the Analytics Blog announced some new features released for Google Analytics users. If you remember  back in March of 2011, Google announced at the Google Analytics Conference in San Francisco that they were accepting users (a limited amount of users) for the new version of Google Analytics to be used and presented the (at the time – future version) new version of Analytics to everyone there. Included in these new features was Event Tracking.

Event Tracking is a method available in the ga.js tracking code that you can use to record user interaction with website elements, such as a Flash-driven menu system. This is accomplished by attaching the method call to the particular UI element you want to track. When used this way, all user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Events in the Analytics reporting interface. Additionally, pageview calculations are unaffected by user activity tracked using the Event Tracking method. Finally, Event Tracking employs an object-oriented model that you can use to collect and classify different types of interaction with your web page objects.

For all of you Lead Gen Arbitragers you can use Event Tracking in Google Analytics to track visitor actions that don’t correspond directly to pageviews. It’s perfect  for tracking things like:

Now how could this be useful to a lead gen arbitrager? Let’s say you were offering a free pdf download or even a video, you can track the number of downloads using event tracking. For example, we can use the category to designate the click was of type “download”. We can use the action to designate the download was a “whitepaper” and we can use the label to identify the actual whitepaper that was downloaded. You would simply match any event with the category of “download” and the action of “whitepaper”. Set the goal value as 20.

Event tracking is powerful because you can track values, along with the category, action, and label. If you a had video on your squeeze page or product sales page with a little JavaScript, you can track the time a user spends watching the video and send that number back to Google Analytics as an event value. Pretty nice!