In an effort to improve the usefulness of Google Analytics data we’ve implemented several custom Events. For a while now we’ve been automatically tracking things such as:

• Media Links (links to PDFs or images, etc)
• JavaScript Links (where a hyperlink href begins with “javascript:”)
• Email Links (where a hyperlink begins with “mailto:”)
• Tel Links (where a hyperlink begins with “tel:”)
• Anchor Links (where a hyperlink begins with “#”)
• Outbound Links (where the link is navigating to a hostname that doesn’t match the current websites’ hostname)
• Vertical Scroll Position (a percentage of how far down the page a user has scrolled)
• Time Till First Scroll (how many seconds passed before the user scrolled up/down the page)

These allow us to get a better idea of how users are interacting with our websites and determine the efficacy of our buttons and links.

We’re excited to announce that, as of today, we’re also tracking embedded YouTube video playback as a “Video” custom event as well. This will only work automatically if the YouTube video is actually embedded in the website and uses the official embed code directly from YouTube.com. As part of this we’re tracking the following events:

• Start (when a YouTube video is first played starting at zero seconds)
• Play (when a video is played, after it’s been paused)
• Pause (when a video is paused, when the user navigates away from the page, or closes the browser tab/window)
• End (when the end of the video is reached)

Note that some custom reporting will be necessary to fully utilize this, as well as some parsing in something like Excel (to separate the video name from the time and percentage played). If you have any questions about how to view these custom Events just let us know.