Google event tracking (background events)

Question

Ok so here is a scenario I would like to get some ideas on:

A user shows up to my site and registers for my service...lets call the service "vaporware".

After registration the user proceeds to view all the glorious features that my cloud based vaporware has to offer. Each feature that they use during their visit is recorded using Event Tracking in Google Analytics and I can effectively track engagement.

Now the problem:

One of the features in my Vapor product has tasks built in. These tasks are important for a number of reasons...they are recurring and do not require any action from the user to execute.

How would I using either "old" google analytics or the new Universal Analytics go about tying these "background events" visitors? I am thinking that the new Measurement Protocol may be have the answer as this perhaps can be considered cross platform tracking...

Regardless this keeps coming up a lot for me and am interested even finding a hack/work around to start recording these types of events in GA.

Answer 1

If they're logged in, you can substitute the autogenerated client ID with your own user/account ID (make sure to anonymize it before sending it to Google).

With the Measurement Protocol it's the cid parameter:

...v=1&tid=UA-XXXX-Y&cid=my-user-identifier&t=event...

In the Universal Analytics JS code, it would be something like this:

ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y', {
  'clientId': 'my-user-identifier'
});

Hope this helps :)