How does Google Analytics treat images?

Question

Imagine the following scenario.

1. A visitor has loaded a page, which is a thumbnail gallery. The page has got a Google Analytics script. The links from the thumbnails go directly to images. Simply like so
   <a href=“images/foo.png”><img src=“images/foo_thumbnail.png” /></a> .

2. The visitor clicks on the thumbnail, and loads a large image. In this scenario, the large version of the image is just a bare image file, so it can’t call an Analytics script by itself.

3. The visitor clicks the back button and goes back to the thumbnail gallery.

How does Google Analytics track in this scenario? Are there any peculiarities associated with this?

edit:
It would be nice if I could track image clicks. But what I'm really after is accurate tracking of User Flow through the HTML pages. If a foray into an image are not tracked, that's alright, that's not too bad. But If a foray into an image starts a new session for the same visitor, that would be too messy.

Answer 1

Interesting question Nick!

As far as I know, in the use case you just described, Google Analytics would treat this as follows -

• The thumbnail gallery can be tracked
• The click on the thumbnail can be tracked using event tracking
• If the user clicks on an image, that would be treated as an exit
• If the user uses back and comes back within the session timeout (30 min by default), then its the same session, however, its a new pageview
• If its after the session timeout, then its a new session, with a new entry URL and of course a new pageview