Tracking internal links usage with Google Analytics

how to implement this properly?

[idolw]

We are building a new site and want to have analytics done properly from day 1.
The entire website is going to be database-driven and there will only be 4 or 5 page templates:
- home page
- country widgets page
- city widgets page
- widget page

On each of the pages above users will be able to perform infinite number of auctions. For example on city widgets pages users can:
- use a search panel
- click on a widget category link
- click on a widget page link
- click on header link
- click on footer link
We have prepared such list for every page template.

Now, we want the users to perform certain actions, e.g. on a widget page we want them to click the "BUY NOW" button in first place or click "SEE SIMILAR WIDGETS" in second place, while hitting header and footer links might be considered as failures of the pages.

Thus, we need to track all clicks on the internal links to see how each and every page behaves so that we can master the entire buying funnel page after page.

Having done some research it seems to me that we should be using Google Analytics pageTracker for this.

How does it sound to you? Any advice before we start coding this into the site?

[BradleyT]

Not sure if you need to use that. Navigation summary or site overlay will give you what you're looking for on any individual page.

What I use the pagetracker for is when I have 2 links to the same destination on a page and want to see which performs better.

For example on one of our homepages we have a text link and a graphic that go to the same page. In order to compare the clicking I put pageTracker._trackPageview on both of the links. You could add it on just 1 but if you use a tracking directory it makes it easy to compare without having to do any math.

For example you might use this on the image -
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/carslink/image/18');
And use this on the text link -
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/carslink/text/anchor-text-here');

Then you pull up a report including only /carslink/ and you get easily comparable data.

[idolw]

Thanks for your reply BradleyT.

Navigation summary and site overlay seems to work fine for one particular page and not for a page template. Since we will have thousands of database-driven pages based on just a couple of templates we would like to use data for entire template. That way I will be able to drive more traffic to each template and perform quicker tests.

Is there any better way to check page templates and not pages?