Google Analytics - Events versus Pageviews, can you compare them?

Question

Hi,

A mortgage page on our website is accesible by multiple links on one page. In order to determine which of the links on that same page has been clicked on, I use event tracking. All events for these links are being stored under the category: "mortgage" When I look at the total number of pageviews for this mortgage page and the total number of events for the event category "mortgage", the number of pageviews is 10%-20% higher.

My questions are:

• Can I compare pageviews and events?
• If not, why not?

Thanks,

Aart Nicolai (funda.nl)

Answer 1

The 10%-20% that your seeing are people that are viewing the page and not clicking the link that you have the event on.

Comparing them is the best way to determine how well the site is performing in terms of enticing visitors to click on the link.

Incidentally, within Google Analytics, you can add the Page dimension to your Events reports to get a breakdown of which page the user was on when the event occurred. This is especially useful if you have similar events on different pages of the site.