How track clicks on links, what does "event without interaction" influence

Question

Google Analytics can show you which previous page brought your visitors to a page, but it can't tell you which button it was.

So I set up event tracking for buttons and links, to figure out later which button was clicked.

Are these button-clicks Events Without Interaction?

One example in the documentation states that if you were tracking clicks on a «Read More» button by means of events, you would set «Event without Interaction» to false, since it should create a new page view (it's opening the next page).

Other parts of the documentation only mention influences on the calculation of bounce rate.

For my understanding that's just wrong:

1. The Click-Event is called. This does not change anything, except for forwarding the info to Analytics
2. The browser handles the click by changing page. This will be tracked as a new page view, since the tracking code is loaded freshly.

With that understanding you'd only set Event without Interaction to false if your script, not your browser, handles the page load.

Or does the Event Without Interaction prevent the following page load from being tracked?

Answer 1

Interaction Events do influence the bounce rate.

Analytics defines a bounce as someone loading your site and then leaving with 0 interactions. Consider a visitor landing on your article page, clicks the "read more" button and then exits the browser.

If you attach a GA event to clicking the "read more" button and set it to be an Event without interaction = true then this would count as a bounce. If Event without interaction = false is set, then this user would not count as a bounce because he had an interaction on the site.

A good example where you want to use non-interaction events are "scroll depth tracking via events". That way a user coming to your site and scrolling all the way to the bottom, then leaving without a subsequent pageview it would be recorded as a bounce as GA intends it.

Event without interaction has no affect on subsequent pageloads or how the browser handles anything. Loading a second page would automatically make the session a non-bounce session since loading page #2 is considered an interaction with the site.