Question

The site that I’m working on has really crappy title structure and can’t be changed for a variety of reasons. Can I “set” the page title for Google Analytics via JS somehow?

Answer 1

The New Way

There’s a (currently undocumented feature) that allows you to override the current page’s title:

_gaq.push(["_set", "title", "Your Brand New Page Title"]);
_gaq.push(["_trackPageview"]); //will send with the overridden page title

---

The Old Way

Google Analytics gets the title information from document.title, so you could just set document.title before Google Analytics runs to whatever value you want it to be.

_gaq.push(function(){
    var oldtitle = document.title; 
    document.title = "More Descriptive Title";
    _gaq.push(["_trackPageview"]);
    document.title = oldtitle;
});

Tests in Chrome seem to indicate that this doesn’t cause a title flicker, but your results may vary.