Mixpanel - Track All Links and get the link value

Question

Rather than setting up IDs and setting up a separate tracking event for each link (my code changes often), I was wondering if there was a way I could set Mixpanel up to track all links (and buttons even) and get the value of the link eg "/readmore" so that I don't have to code for each possibility.

I looked at the Mixpanel Javascript API reference and read about mixpanel.track_links which seems to be in the right direction for what I am looking for, but i have to specify a "name" upfront which would register all events with the same name?

Here's some example code from the mixpanel api reference:

// with properties function
mixpanel.track_links
("#footer", "Footer link", function(ele) { return { type: $(ele).attr('type')}});

I'd like to replace "#footer" with say "a" i.e all links, and then for the value of the link to be returned.

Is this even possible?

Answer 1

From what I've seen, the mixpanel selector engine is quite limited and it appears that multiple selector syntax is not supported. However, if you give all your button and anchor elements a class, you will be able to target them with one call to track_links (with the added advantage that you can easily exclude elements you don't want to track):

mixpanel.track_links(".mixpanel-tracked", "Link clicked", function(ele) { 
    return { type: $(ele).attr('type') } 
});

If you can't use a class for whatever reason, you could target multiple elements by naming your function and passing a reference to it to separate calls to the track_links function:

var getLinkData = function(ele) { 
    return { type: $(ele).attr('type') } 
}

mixpanel.track_links('a', 'Link clicked', getLinkData);
mixpanel.track_links('input', 'Link clicked', getLinkData);