Question

Looking at the documentation on the web, it seems to be a common practise to track outbound links as a virtual pageview with a URL like /outgoing/{original_url}. But a lot of that documentation is from before Google added events to analytics. Which is the preferred method nowadays – page views or events?

Answer 1

The ‘correct’ way is to track outbound links, downloads, etc. as events. – Creating virtual pageviews is a hack, from back when events wasn’t released.

Virtual pageview tracking artificially inflates the number of aggregated pageview, and thereby polutes the data, so best-practice is to avoid this if possible.

However, there are cases where virtual-pageview-tracking is the only solution, and thats when you need to track the outbound link (or download etc.) as a goal – and thereby being able to optimize against this goal in AdWords.

Examples include AdWords optimization with regard to PDF-download.

If this is not the case, use event-tracking.

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A standard snippet is (which simply is included in the specific <a>‘s onclick-attribute):

_trackEvent('Outbound link', 'Click', 'http://www.external-link.com', 0)

Google has another solution to this:

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527

Which tracks the events, waits 100ms and the redirects to the external link – this imo, is not the best solution.

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Another thing to remember, is that the onclick-event is not fired when the user right-clicks -> open in tab, or the equilivant middle-click.