The Wheeler Centre

Established in 2010, The Wheeler Centre is a literary and publishing centre in Melbourne, Australia. The centre is a venue for high-profile public talks on a variety of topics with many of these recorded and made available to users of their website in video or podcast form.

To better understand its audience, The Wheeler Centre makes extensive use of Google Analytics but needed a way to measure user activity in situations where this couldn’t be captured by the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking snippet, such as when a podcast episode is played in iTunes, an RSS feed of articles is downloaded, or a user adds an event to their calendar via the ‘Add to calendar’ button on the event’s detail page.

The solution here was to implement server-side tracking of these events. Clicks on URLs for trackable events are intercepted, with the relevant metadata including the requested resource and the type of action (such as downloading a file or subscribing to a podcast) sent to Google Analytics. The user is then seamlessly redirected to the content they originally requested.