jquery deep linking - how does it effect analytics?

Question

I am looking into using http://www.asual.com/jquery/address/ , but I am wondering how it effects google analytics. Google analytics is a snippet of code at the bottom of pages. I would imagine deep linking would still look like activity on the initial page, not new pages.

Answer 1

From what I can see it will look to google analytics like navigating to a new page.

Just open e.g. http://www.asual.com/jquery/address/samples/tabs/ and check the requests FF makes (e.g. with Live HTTP Headers) and you will see that the google analytics fires a request for every tab you switch to.

Answer 2

in it's current version 1.3 the jquery address plugin tries to do the ga tracking automatically, using the asynchronous ga tracking (see http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncUsageGuide.html). this is also mentioned in plugin's api docs at http://www.asual.com/jquery/address/docs/#api-reference (look for $.address.tracker)

actually this new behaviour (i was using address' version 1.0 before) broke my custom tracking code on an ajax site - as it isn't configurable, i had to downgrade to 1.0.

Answer 3

As long as the page, and the analytics code is being loaded, it will still count as a hit on the page. I don't think there would be any negative impacts of using this plug in.