Question

I have a site that lists business listings from a database. On each page you can do different things such as forward it to a friend, print the page etc. My question is could I use google analytics to track impressions and views for each listing? So if I showed the top 10 listings on the home page I want to track each listing as an impression since its being showed, then if they click one of the links to view the business listing it tracks it as a view. Then on the business listing details page if they do any of the actions such as forward to a friend or print the page I want to track that as well.

For tracking views/clicks Im assuming I would need to use setPageView passing something like setPageView(‘/listing/12345’) correct? I dont know how to track it for impressions though. Then on the listing details page to track if they printed it etc Im assuming I would track it as an event? Such as trackEvent(‘listing’, ‘Print’) if that is what I need to do for event how does it associate with the page tracking so that I could see how many times someone printed the listing page for /listings/12345?

Answer 1

No need to create fake page views. Google Analytics has a feature called Event Tracking, which is described in the Event Tracking Guide. The guide has an illustrative example;

A simple example illustrates how you might use the Event Tracking method
to record user interaction with a video Play link on your page. It
assumes that pageTracker is the name used for your tracking object.

<a href="#" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday']);">Play</a>

In this scenario, the reports for Events would display Videos as the Category,
Play as the Action, and Baby’s First Birthday as the Label.

In your case, you would track Views and Clicks using the Event Tracking feature. You’d have to decide on how you’d want Actions, Categories and Labels set up to match your data. You might want package types (Gold, Silver etc) as Categories or Labels, for example.

This question and its answers are similar to your scenario.