I am confused about how this tracks links to downloads & external pages. When I have done this manually in the past I have done so using the method outlined by Google (http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55529) which results in these links actually showing up as content (rather than events) in Analytics. This makes it much easier to see the exits users take from a given page. As far as I can tell with this module all downloads are recorded as Events in Google Analytics and I can view these events but they are not integrated into the content reporting that Analytics does. Am I missing something somewhere?

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#2 googleanalytics.js_.patch693 bytespfournier

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hass’s picture

hass commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

No, this is how it works today.

1. Downloads are not pages of your site.
2. External sites are also not pages of your site.

pfournier’s picture

pfournier commented
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new googleanalytics.js_.patch693 bytes

I had a request this week to log downloads as page views. Here is a small patch that makes this possible.

Maybe the choice of logging downloads as pageviews or events should be added as a setting to the module?

hass’s picture

hass commented

This does not make sense to me. If you have an extension that is not executed on server side it must be a download. You are also free to remove an extension from the list of download extensions if you'd like... no need to clutter the module. By your change the module behaves really wrong.

pfournier’s picture

pfournier commented

From what I understand from googleanalytics.js, if I remove an extension from the list, the link will not be tracked at all.

I think if you consider a file to be part of your site content, it makes sense to track it as a page view; this method has the advantage of showing the number of clicks in GA Site Overlay.

I don't think either way (page view or event) is fundamentaly wrong. GA documentation gives example for both cases: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55529 and http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html. That is why I suggested the GA module could give users a choice. You could even track the download as a page view AND an event.