Google Analytics download tracking in SharePoint 2007 publishing sites

Question

Has anyone got this to work without adding the specific java script to each and every link? I’ve tried both of these solutions

http://www.goodwebpractices.com/roi/track-downloads-in-google-analytics-automatically.html

http://www.iqcontent.com/blog/2006/11/tracking-document-downloads-in-google-analytics/

Without success, maybe I’m doing something wrong.

Update 1

I have added the GA tracking code to the master page and statistics are being recorded, however the downloads are not.

Answer 1

You need to add the google analytics page tracking to the master page. I got it working read this article which helped me.

http://mikeknowles.com/blog/2009/07/11/EnableGoogleAnalyticsPageTrackingInASingleNameIntranetSite.aspx

Answer 2

Sorry forgot to say SetDomainName to none

So it should look something like this

<script type="text/javascript">
    var _gaq = _gaq || [];
    _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'Your google tag here']);
    _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); 
    _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
      (function() {
        var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
        ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
        var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
      })();
</script>

Answer 3

If I understand how Google Analytics works, I don't believe you can use it track downloads. The script loads when a page is loaded to track the user. When you click to download a document, you aren't loading another page... you're just downloading the document.

As @Ryan points out, you could track document downloads on a page using GA's "virtual page views". You would probably need some additional JavaScript on the page that attaches the code to the onclick event of every link pointing to a document. A downside, is that this will not track document downloads that the user was directly linked to (ex: emailed doc link to a user).

If you need to track all downloads, you'll need to consume the IIS logs which tracks every request.

Answer 4

using jQuery this this is the code I eventually figured out...

$(document).ready(function() {

    var ext = new Array(); 
    ext = ['pdf', 'zip', 'doc', 'docx', 'xls', 'xlsx', 'ppt', 'pptx', 'mp3', 'txt', 'vsd', 'rar', 'wma', 'avi', 'mmv']; 

    for (var i in ext)
    {
        var fileType = 'a[href$="'+ext[i]+'"]';

        $(fileType).live('click', function() {

            var link= $(this).attr("href");        
            _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', link]);
            _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Download', 'Click', $(this).text()]);
        });        
    }
});

there is one draw back to this - any content loaded via ajax e.g. a grouped by column webpart will not fire the click event, see here