How to set up a schema for tracking certain things on a website is a polarizing topic. I’ve seen numerous schema that rely solely on pageviews to track everything—outbound link clicks, downloads, modal dialogs, etc—and the creator is dogmatic about the approach. But, semantically speaking, one of those three actions is a legitimate pageview; two aren’t. They’re events. I’m admittedly zealous when it comes to semantic use of Web technologies, but let’s face it: it makes for intelligent information architecture.
A good philosophy for tracking is: if new information is shown in the browser, at an address owned by you, it is a pageview. Everything else is an event.
Tracking link clicks
The short answer: tracking a link is tracking an event.
For instance, clicking on an outbound link does not result in a pageview for your website. Viewers are not looking at content on your site. Thus, an outbound link click is an event.
Clicking on a related link—such as to another similar blog post—is not a pageview, it is an event. The pageview itself will be tracked when the new page loads, but if you want to track the actual link click, you should register an event. Otherwise, you’ll be double tracking pageviews or tracking pageviews for a single page under multiple paths. Neither is ideal or desirable in an intelligent tracking schema.
Clicking a link that triggers a popup is covered in:
Tracking pop-up, modal, or ajax-inserted content
Are you tracking this based on link clicks? Why?
When tracking a popup, you should add tracking code to the popup file. The new window is a pageview. There’s no reason to track the link click as the pageview when you can add basic code to the popup and let Google handle it all.
For modal or ajax-inserted content, proper tracking means triggering a pageview when the content is shown. This is different from when the triggering link is clicked. Most plugins that allow modal dialogs or on-screen popups have an API that features some sort of onShow or afterRendering hook. This is the best place to put your pageview tracking. And yes, this is a pageview, because it is showing new content.
There are some cases where the link should be tracked, and those should be tracked as events. For instance, if you have a modal or popup contact form, you’ll want to track a pageview when the form is displayed, and an event to track which page the form is on or which link is used to display the form. Two different types of tracking that happen at two different (but very close together) points in the interaction.
The tricky case of PDF documents
PDF documents are one case where I entertain either option, but that is because there are two possible ways that PDFs extend the website: as downloadable content or as browser-viewable content. Older browsers and the default installation of Firefox treat PDFs as downloads. They are not displayed in-browser. Thus, under my definition of a pageview, clicking on a PDF link is an event. Think of it this way: we know that the user clicked the link, but we can’t be sure that the user actually downloaded or opened the document, so there’s no empirical evidence that there was a pageview.
However, modern browsers like Safari and Chrome, and certain mobile platforms will open PDF files seamlessly. In that case, for most intents and purposes, clicking a link results in a definite pageview.
Example cases:
- Server forces PDF download, will not serve in browser
- Event. There is no possibility the page is viewed in the browser. Any content is downloadable, not viewable.
- PDF is provided because resources/desire/ability to convert to Web are not available, but is considered Web content
- Pageview. There is a possibility that the page will be viewed in the browser, and that is the intended functionality anyway.
- File is of a form or tutorial intended for printing
- Event. The intent is not to view the content, but to provide a format for printing and interacting with outside of the Web. This is not pageview content.
In most situations where I’ve implemented tracking for PDFs, their use has fallen under the event philosophy, but I do see instances where a pageview does make sense.
How do you make decisions about pageviews or events? How do you use the resulting data?
This post follows How to Check if Google Analytics Click Tracking is Triggered, a post about debugging your events and pageview code. I hope to follow this with a tutorial about implementing JavaScript for this tracking.