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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?

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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?

What may be happening here is the same thing that affects the bounce rate. See Bounce Rate Impact

If so, there any way to trigger an event in the events section without it reporting to the unique visitor count?

Doesn't look like it since the event tracking works with the gif request.

This is because Event Tracking, like page tracking is classified as an interaction request.

For example, suppose you have a page with a video player where the bounce rate is historically high, and you have not implemented Event Tracking for the page. If you subsequently set up Event Tracking for the player, you might notice a decrease in the bounce rate for that page, because Analytics will record user interaction with the player and send that interaction to the server as an additional GIF request.

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  • Our bounce rate definitely went down noticeably; but it doesn't seem to indicate anywhere in the GA documentation that an event fired on an external domain would register in your own reporting suite as a unique.
    – Jesse Gardner
    Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 2:41
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I think to find the best answer is to compare GA data with server log data for example AWStats and figure out why numbers are different, GA can't be triggered always, by one or another reason.

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