Public Media Metrics Forum

[admin]

We've had lots of folks ask us how to tag links for everything from audio streams to downloadable documents for tracking clicks in GA. I've looked around a bit, thought over the possibility of using some kind of javascript solution to parse HTML and generate the new link code automagically, etc.

I think I may have finally found something that could work.

Take a look at "Tracking document downloads in Google Analytics," a blog post written by Colm McBarren at iqcontent.com. He provides a description of his event-listening code to detect clicks on link and update them with GA code (more or less).

Colm says that his JavaScript, which is available for download within that post, is capable of tracking internal downlads as well as external links.

I'll be testing this script to see what side effects it may or may not have, accuracy, etc. But based on commenters on his post, it sounds like it works out pretty well for most folks.

[dhoffman]

Great, Bill, this does show promise. Nice to see that others are looking for "generic" approaches to keep the headache-level down for large sites.

Looking forward to seeing you at the IMA conference in LA!

Best-
-David