Question

Whenever a user visits “Page A” on my site, I immediately redirect him to “Page B” by setting window.location with Javascript. “Page A” has no Google Analytics tracking on it — when someone is redirected from “Page A” to “Page B” I want to track him as if he entered the site via “Page B”. Unfortunately, my current setup breaks referrer information since people who are redirected to “Page B” appear to Google Analytics as if they came from “Page A”:

alt text http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2792776/screenshots/2010-05-06_1402.png

After users are redirected to “Page B”, I want to tell Google Analytics their “real” referrer (i.e., the referrer to “Page A”). How can I do this?

(Note: I realize that using a real HTTP redirect instead of a Javascript-based redirect would solve this problem. Unfortunately this isn’t an option)

Answer 1

The solution described in this blog post seems to work — I added this to “Page A”:

<script type="text/javascript"> 
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-11");
  pageTracker._initData();
</script>

Which seems to capture the initial referrer without recording duplicate pageviews