Google announced the addition of non-interaction events to its set of event tracking metrics.

“”But wait!’ you ask, ‘How can an event-which measures user interaction-be non-interactive? And why would I want that anyway?,” says Patricia Boswell of the Google Analytics Team. “The answer is simple: sometimes you want to track passive events on your pages, like images from an automatic slide show. In this case, you want such events to be excluded from bounce rate calculations because they don’t track visitor interaction. Now, you can mark these events as non-interaction events, so that they don’t affect the bounce rate for the page.”

She uses an example of an image slide show that automatically serves up 5 images in rotating order on a site’s homepage. “You want to apply an event tracking call with each movement of the slider, so that you know which images are being seen most by visitors to your home page,” says Boswell. “However, there isn’t really any interaction required on the visitors’ behalf to engage with this slider. You know that in the past, event tracking for this slider would make the bounce rate for your home page drop dramatically. Better to exclude these events from bounce rate calculation, so that the bounce rate for your home page is calculated only from pageviews for the page and not events.”

She explains how to use the code in this blog post.

There’s been a lot going on with Google Analytics this month. For one, Google announced that it would make encrypted search the default for signed in users of Google.com, meanwhile blocking specific referral data. This hasn’t gone over incredibly well with the webmaster community. There’s even a petition aimed at getting Google to reconsider.

Google also started letting Analytics users get Webmaster Tools data in their GA accounts, an extension of a previously launched pilot program.

Finally, Google announced Flow Visualization in Google Analytics, which lets you analyze insights in a visual way, to help you better understand how visitors flow throughout the pages of your site.