Use events or virtual pageviews for Google Analytics and ajax

Question

What makes more sense (or is proper according to google)? Registering an event or a virtual pageview with Google Analytics when tracking navigation through a webpage with heavy use of ajax?

I had been using events to track this kind of thing, but I find myself kind of emulating the pageview mechanism by tracking the clicks through events like the following:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'signup', 'clicked', 'header']);

should I instead be creating virtual pageviews when visitors click on links that call AJAX and bring up dynamic content?

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/signup/form']);

Answer 1

If this is a new content that user navigates to, then you should be using virtual pageviews.

If you use events for all navigation then some metrics will be unreliable like pages/visit, avgTimeOnPage, avgTimeOnSite, pageDepth. If you use pageviews for navigation these metrics will be closer to the truth.

Answer 2

Since not so long ago, you couldn't set up goals for events, which made virtual pageviews the way to go. These days, you can set up event goals, so the question is certainly valid.

What you can do with virtual pageviews (and not with events) is to visualize a funnel. If you want to follow the path of your visitors, I'd recommend a virtual pageview.

If you're using events, you can only find out that some time during the visit, the visitor opened the form. With virtual pageviews you can see in what preceeded the form, what lead the visitor to it.

Answer 3

I would go with the event tracking for more information about the event. Showing an in-page form that doesn't change the content is more of an event, but it's not really down to that, but rather how you need to report it.

Using pageviews for dynamic events within page would inflate the actual pageview numbers and since you can use events as goals in the new UI, there is no reason to track them as pageviews anymore.