Tracking visits to pages using AJAX (Web 2.0 stuff), Flash, and even downloads used to be difficult to track. Now with Google Analytics’ Event Tracking, you can track when people use different dynamic elements in AJAX, Flash, and more. It is still all JavaScript based, but Event Tracking lets you do way more than before.

I’ve discussed before the use of an “OnClick” event to track downloads or other actions, and Event Tracking works very similar to this. Here is an example:

onclick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday');"

Instead of just putting in a fake name for a page, you can now put in a category, action, and a value. In the above example, the category is Videos, the action is Play, and the label is Baby’s First Birthday. No value was included, but a value could be valuable if you wanted to track how far a download went, or a long loading screen.

This is really a great step forward for Google Analytics, because now you can group these actions by categories and keep track of everything better. Interestingly, there is a ~500 event limit for each visitor.

I’m going to start playing with more event tracking now, and my next job is to see how it works with “Goals”.