

Diving deep into user behavior with Google Analytics, Event Tracking, and jQuery - briancray
http://briancray.com/2009/12/29/understanding-user-behavior-google-analytics-event-tracking-jquery/

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teye
Good post... bravo for increasing awareness about GA's lesser-known features.

Why does this require asynchronous GA and jQuery in the head?

Asynchronous GA seems like a best practice, but how would that affect the
amount of event data you collect?

jQuery in the head would net you a negligible increase in data, and only for
particularly heavy sites. No?

I use event tracking across a few sites in varying configurations (sync/head,
async/footer, etc.) and would think anyone using GA and jQuery can benefit
from this advice without changing their existing structure.

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travisp
I think it only "requires" it if you want to copy and paste his code. If
you're willing to modify his code, I don't think it's necessary.

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briancray
If you put code in the code, it will capture user actions (such as clicks)
prior to loading all resources. If it's at the bottom of the </body> and the
user clicks a link, you may not capture that click. Thus, giving you
inaccurate analytics.

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antirez
For this I find tools like lloogg.com invaluable (disclaimer: I'm the author
of LLOOGG, but I'm currently not really running it as a business, at least for
now, so I mean, LLOOGG or any other good real-time stat stuff).

There is nothing as good as identifying patterns as the human brain, and a few
minutes every day of actually seeing what users are doing on your site is very
good.

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jbyers
We do this to the tune of a million events a day (not pageviews, actual UI
interactions) and it works well, especially given the $0 price tag. What's
lacking is event correlation of the kind that KissMetrics and others support:
how many users who performed event X went on to perform event Y.

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jsm386
Great post. I've been relying on heatmapping tools like Crazy Egg to answer
some of those questions about where users are clicking. There are some
definite limitations though; it seems like GA might fill those gaps nicely -
for free.

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adatta02
how does this compare to something like MixPanel?

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briancray
Wow... never looked into MixPanel -- you know, it may be just what I need!
Thanks for pointing it out adatta02

