Google Analytics: Do unique events report as unique visits when triggered on pages other than your own domain?
- by Jesse Gardner
We just recently attached a SWF to our Brightcove video player to report various events back to Google Analytics. We're also tracking page views with a standard GA snippet on the page where the player is embedded. As I understand it, because a unique has already been recorded for the page, any event being triggered by the player is getting associated with that unique.
However, we allow people to embed the video player on other websites. All of the event data started pouring into the Events section as expected, but we noticed a dramatic uptick in unique visitors on the site (nearly double) while the pageview count stayed relatively unchanged. Disabling event tracking brought the traffic back down to average levels.
I should also add that in the Pages section of Event tracking we're seeing URLs for other sites where the player has been embedded; but this data isn't showing up in the Content section.
It seems counterintuitive, but does GA count an event fired as a unique visit even if it's triggered from some place other than your website? Is so, there any way to trigger an event in the events section without it reporting to the unique visitor count?
