First: Yes, it is possible ;-). It entails writing an IMG tag with a specially-formulated URL, nested in a NOSCRIPT container. Google doesn't document it for some reason. Here's a high-level overview of how it would work:

http://www.vdgraaf.info/google-analytics-without-javascript.html

This is one of those things that one could make work in a theme without having to have it in a module. But then, this whole module is like that -- we use the module because it gives us more than we could easily get by hacking the theme. This would be a nice bit of gravy with that other stuff.

(Specifying HEAD because I'm not sure what else to spec.)

Comments

escoles’s picture

escoles commented
Priority: Normal » Minor

(meant to set this "minor", just realized it's not)

(Also, the article I linked -- you have to read between the lines to see that it's possible to do it by simply implanting image tags in noscript containers. The author is doing it directly from the server, which is also feasible, but which I think probably takes more work to implement well.)

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

Nice find. However if its not documented by Google then it has a good case of becoming broken in the future if Google decides to update something minor.

Tracking for RSS feeds is a nice to have feature, although images could be blocked/stripped in the RSS reader too.

hass’s picture

hass commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

I guess this feature will never implemented until Google supports it and two years without any progress in this issue makes no sense to me.