One of the most interesting parts for web site owners are the access statistics, and Google Analytics offers one of the most complete statistics solutions, which I use on a weekly basis for my most successful blog El Canasto.
Besides being a typical blog with pages, I offer calendars for downloading, and of course I also want to track those downloads. When two years ago I started with the downloads I search Google’s help files for a solution to track them, and found a small javascript sniplet that when a visitor clicks on a download link registers the download as a pageview. This trick allowed me to analyse the downloads.
The disadvantage of this trick is that it inflates the pageviews, and I never have been completely satisfied about this solution. You can imagine my happiness when last week I discovered the Event Tracking feature, designed specifically to track downloads, videoplays, etc.
I quickly changed my code to use a javascript sniplet like the following:
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackEvent('Downloads',
'XLSX', '/calendario-compacto/calendario-compacto-2009'); "
This sniplet registers the download under the category Downloads, the action XLS and the label /calendario-compacto/calendario-compacto-2009. Google Analytics has Event reports by category, action and level, so now I know for example which of the four file file formats are more popular:
