Google Analytics offers Event Tracking, which is useful for tracking JavaScript and Flash events.  But there's at least a day's delay before you can get analytics to show up, so if you're testing your own or a client's site, it could take a while to get things right.

There is, however, a way to check if your event-tracking code is working on your pages.  This way you don't have to wait to log in to Analytics the next day and see if your events registered.

Required ingredients

1. Implementation of Google Analytics tracking code in the website you want to track
2. Mozilla Firefox
3. Firebug extension for Firefox

What to do

It's really quite simple:

1. Load up your website and start up Firebug.  If you have screenspace you would want to pop Firefox out of the browser window into its own window.
2. Enable the Net panel in Firebug.
3. Once you've got the website up, click around or do whatever to trigger the events are you want to track.
4. If event tracking is working, you should see an entry like the following upon triggering your event:

 



 

5. Go ahead and click the "+" button to the left and select "Params", which will show you something like:

 



 

6. What you're looking for is the highlighted entry, because this shows you the parameters you entered in your event-tracking code.  In my case, the code was:

page_Tracker._trackEvent('site' , 'click' , 'Pkstore');

7. So now you know that event-tracking is working for this event.  You can check other events in the same way.