Google Analytics offers a wealth of information and statistics to monitor and understand your site usage. I always like to squeeze blood from a stone and get Google Analytics to offer more.

For the Google Analytics enthusiast there are plenty of ways to do this. We often like and want to know how users interact within our clients sites. One great way to do this is to record a users actions throughout a site. This can be done by using the Google Analytics event tracking method / functionality (_trackEvent()).

I will give some examples then show you how easy it is to implement.

A travel client of ours had a country map of the travel destinations they offered. We wanted to know which travel destinations our visitors where most interested in. By recording the destination clicks in our flash map we could record which destination got the most clicks.

This can be valuable information to the client as they can get an understanding of which destinations visitors are reviewing the most and therefore focus their energy in offering those travel packages.

Another client offered free quotes to their visitors. They had a big quote button positioned on their page. At the same time we were doing some split site testing on their site to identify which version of the site generated the most conversions. In the split testing we were testing the position of the quote button. The button was either position on the far left of the page or the far right of the page.

Using Google Analytics event tracker we tracked the clicks on the button when it was on the left versus clicks on the right hand side of the page. With the data from our split site testing there where some interesting results.

The results from the split site testing showed that there was a very small difference in the conversion (visitors completing the quote form) between visitors who clicked the left or right button. i.e. the same amount of visitors, who filled out a quote form, came from a quote button click when it was positioned on the left or right hand side of the page. However, Google Analytics recorded that more people clicked the button when it was on the left hand side than those when it was positioned on the right hand side.

From this we can confirm that items on the left hand side of the page receives more attention than items on the right; this of course may be different in other cultures (Western cultures read from left to right – but that’s for other blog entry).

We are getting more clicks to our quote page when the button is on the left. But the conversions are the same when the button is on the right. We therefore may need to optimise our quote landing page to entice the extra visitors that came from the left hand button position to complete the quote form.

A client wanted to funnel more clients to his ecommerce shop page. Currently he already had a “Shop” menu item for visitors to click on. But we wanted to test whether a call to action button, placed in the header of his site, would generate more clicks to the shop page.

The one problem is that the shop page URL for both the menu item and the button would be the same. So we add event tracking to each URL click respectively to distinguish the difference between the call to action button in the header and the menu item.

From the data we can analyse to see if we generated more traffic to the shop page and from which item (button or menu item) the traffic came from.

It’s really simple.

This is the method:

_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

So for my client with the alternating button position I added this to the page link:

Left Hand button

Right Hand button

More information about event tracking implementation can be found in Google Analytics guide here:http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html