Documentation: Calls Reference

gaAddons brings several enhancements and seemlesly integrates with your existing Google Analytics async tracking code snippet. Each gaAddons call comes with pre-configured default options which can be overwritten using the same flexible tracking syntax found in Google Analytics async calls.

For each call, most parameters are optional. In the documentation for each parameter, the default value is always the first indicated.

Page views or events?

The _trackOutbound, _trackDownload, _trackMailTo calls can be tracked as events or page views (see the 'method' option for each call). The Web Analytics Association defines a page as being "an analyst definable unit of content", which a downloabable document is in most cases.

The key difference between those two tracking methods is that (at the moment) the Event Tracking cannot be assigned to Goals. Another significant difference is that virtual pageviews can inflate the pageviews of a website. This can be solved by creating a secondary profile using same id and filter out the virtual pageviews.

	Event Tracking	Virtual Pageview
Bounce Rate	Reduced Bounce Rate	Reduced Bounce Rate
Page Views	No increase on total pageviews	Artificial increase on total pageviews
Detailed Tracking	Tracks more details correlated to actions	Limited information
Goals	Not supported	Supported
Limitations	Up to 500 GATC requests per session	Up to 500 GATC requests per session

Ref. Google Analytics: Event Tracking vs Virtual Pageviews

To bounce or not to bounce?

By default, if someone lands on your website and click a downloadable or outbound link, and leave right after, this visit is considered a bounce - that is, this is a single page visit. However, from a business perspective, this might be the intended outcome. Therefore, you should set the option 'onBounce":true. See each call documentation to see if they might affect the bounce rate.

Technically, Google Analytics tracks consider a visit to be a bounce if there is only one GA call. So if you fire the regular _trackPageview and an event, it is still a single page visit but not a bounce anymore.

On click or on mouseup?

Some calls, namely _trackPageView, _trackOutbound and _trackDownload, can be initiated on two types of events: clicks or mouseup. A "click", unsuprisingly, happens when you left-click on a link or press enter while the focus is on a link. But the "click" event isn't fired when the right mouse-button is depressed - as in "right-click open in new tab/window" or "right-click save as".

Technically, an onmouseup happens before an onclick event. This is particularly important to know if you have some "onclick" handling attached directly to a link. When using gaAddons, it is not recommended to keep onclick handlers on individual links.

Caveat: if the link-specific onclick handler attemps to cancel the event, gaAddons will still process it.