Naeem Mahmood

Lets say you have lot of forms and you want to track submission of those all forms,

its not always easy to track each one. but now GA made it easy for you. all you need to have a GA account and a profile for you website. you can have multiple forms and any other category in your website that is know is events for Google Analytic, you can easily track it using goals.

lets start with simple tracking.

<a href="idm.html" 
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'downloads', 'IDM', 'tracking IMD downloads counts']);">
Download Internet download manager</a>

above tracking will be used for an click event for any link or button. _gaq.push function will put data to you GA account like its doing for other parameters. may be you have observed there are a lot parameters which actually GA passes data to show you a complete tracking profile.

bellow is a simple form called bio

<form action="submit.php" method="post" name="bio" onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'forms', 'bio', 'submitting bio form']);">
<input type="submit" value="submit" />
</form>

now look at the syntax of _gaq.push function, after _trackEvent next parameter is category which we have forms, because here we want to track lot forms, so we made a category forms. and then form name (event name) and the third parameter is somewhat details about our event. its optional , you can leave it blank, but you must need to put an empty string ”.

in this way you have a category and you want track lot forms , name each form and create a new goal for that form and fill details. you can also take help form my previous post how to fill details of goal

Most of websites today are using GA to tracking and improving their website performance. and its also common technique to setup a goal which is useful too if you want to track specific activity on your website. like the most common example is to track a web form, when user submit that form, its called goal which we can call ‘contact’. Now in Google analytic how do we track this contact form? we used a technique from last many years that is to redirect user to a ‘thank-you’ page. when user enter data and hit submit button, that user will goes to our thank-you page and in GA we track this as goal. this used for couple of years until GA introduced events in GA, now we can track goals without leaving or refreshing page. sometime we come across a case when we can’t create thank-you page or we using AJAX and we don’t want to leave that page. so how do we setup a goal which will track events? this is what i am talking about.

Bellow are 6 easy steps to setup events in GA. i am using it for subscribe button.

1. Open up the profile you wish to set up the goal in.
2. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Google Analytic interface.
3. Click the Goals tab.
4. Choose the Goal Set you wish to add the event to.
5. Name your goal and select the Event radio button.
6. Fill the details which requires as i did bellow.

In Category field put ‘subscribe’ and select “that matches” from drop-down
In Action field put ‘subscribe tracking’ and select “that matches ” from drop-down
and rest of two fields are optional, you can leave blank.

and now in you HTML code put following code in your submit button.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'subscribe', 'subscribe tracking',,, false]);"

for a submit button it will look like

<input id=”subscribe-button” class=”button” type=”submit” value=”Submit” onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'subscribe', 'subscribe tracking',,, false]);">

and that’s it. you have to wait for 24 to 48 hours to see if its tracking properly.