The way goal tracking works for a lot of websites is that you set up a page which displays to the user saying “Thank you for buying widget a’”. When you see someone has visited that page you can see that a sale must have occurred.
Now that is very useful because then you can dig around in the data surrounding that visit, see where they came from and gain some useful business insights like the best converting source of traffic.
I have no thank you page, help!
Some forms of conversion don’t have a separate page to say thank you and use some clever programming to just display thank you on the same page. So how do you track the sale/conversion?
How to track goals with no thank you page
To cut a long story short; If you can’t get a thank you page made, then add analytics event tracking which looks a little something like this:
onclick javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Action type', 'Label']);
What it does is track the goal interdependently of a ‘thank you page’ view via JavaScript and passes the information into your Google Analytics data.
But what about validation?
What if a user fills in the form wrong and has to hit the send button twice? Well Google has thought of that and interaction with an object (button, link etc…) is only ever counted once per visit. SO no worries there either.
Javascript Event tracking for other goals
The nicest thing about this is that you can track almost any action you like from a video play, to a PDF download to even just someone hovering over a picture with the mouse.
There are a 100 different creative and innovative ways you could use this, can you think of one? Kudos for the best Ideas shared are available.
