Update: Tracking Outbound Clicks With Google Analytics And jQuery

A while back I wrote a post about tracking outbound clicks with Google Analytics;way back then (about 6 months ago), the only event that GoogleAnalytics could track was a pageview. Now that they've introduced the _trackEventmethod of the pageTracker object, events that aren't pageviews don'tneed to count as pageviews anymore; instead, they can be counted as"events," and they can be categorized and labeled.

Here's an updated example of how to track outbound clicks usingGoogle Analytics and jQuery. You'll of course need to be including the"new" analytics code (ga.js, not urchin.js) for this to work, as wellas the jQuery library.

$('a').click(function() {
  var $a = $(this);
  var href = $a.attr('href');
 
  // see if the link is external
  if ( (href.match(/^http/)) && (! href.match(document.domain)) ) {
 
    // if so, register an event
    var category = 'outgoing'; // set this to whatever you want
    var event = 'click'; // set this to whatever you want
    var label = href; // set this to whatever you want
 
    pageTracker._trackEvent(category, event, href);
  }
});

You can use the same method to unobtrusively add tracking code to file downloads:

var fileTypes = ['doc','xls','pdf','mp3'];
 
$('a').click(function() {
  var $a = $(this);
  var href = $a.attr('href');
  var hrefArray = href.split('.');
  var extension = hrefArray[hrefArray.length - 1];
 
  if ($.inArray(extension,fileTypes) != -1) {
      pageTracker._trackEvent('download', extension, href);
  }
 
});