14 DAY TRIAL // Google has debuted a simple but interesting new feature for Google Analytics. It is now possible to track non-interactive events, i.e. events that don't require any action from the visitors, but which still involve their attention.
Tracking for these events to ensure that the bounce rate for your site is not negatively influenced, leading to incorrect measurements, has been tricky.
"Sometimes you want to track passive events on your pages, like images from an automatic slide show," Patricia Boswell, Google Analytics team, wrote.
"In this case, you want such events to be excluded from bounce rate calculations because they don’t track visitor interaction. Now, you can mark these events as non-interaction events, so that they don’t affect the bounce rate for the page," she said.
In the past, a compromise was needed, you either tracked these events more closely, sacrificing the bounce rate for certain pages, or gave up on tracking them at all.
In Google's example, trying to track each switch of the image in the slideshow, which happens without any input from the visitor, would see the bounce rate drop.
There is now the possibility of labeling an event as non-interactive, using the _trackEvent() method, just set the last parameter to true. You can check out the new Event Tracking Guide for more info on the changes.
"In the past, you had to trade off bounce rate signals for event tracking in some situations. Now, with the ability to designate an event as either interactive or not, you can have your events and bounces too," Google concluded.
In other Google Analytics news, Google has recently debuted the very sweet looking Flow Visualizations which provide a simple way of checking out visitor paths on your site. Also new is the Webmaster Tools integration which has been rolled out to everyone earlier this month.