How to create a unique identifier for tracking?

An event tracking brain teaser Google Analytics - how do you capture a form value before it's been captured?

• I have event tracking on our email-drops at http://60daymba.com/ set up and working more accurately (the initial reason) than the mere destination-based goals we have up. Tracking when someone hits the thank-you page isn't very accurate for reasons I won't get into. So I set up event tracking with Google Analytics so we can not only to log when people push the submit button and those track as a conversion to email address, with far better accuracy as well as better granularity for WHERE they dropped their email - and a few other things... but the ultimate granularity and what we want so we can track all the way to sale by email address (which is our unique identifier for a customer) instead of just channels/cookies. this is a much more definitive way to know where the money is coming from. Right now as part of each <form> on the website that takes an email drop, we have something very similar to the following as the submit button tag: <input onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'EmailsDropped', 'OnSubmit', 'HomePageTopDrop', ']);"  type="submit" value="START WITH 5 FREE CASE STUDIES" > I believe the best way to accomplish my goal is to set the event tracking 'value' field such as it is immediately below (a very slight modification to the above input tag) However, I don't know how to get the actual email address into the value field, as the form has not been submitted until the input button is pressed, and thus has not been processed at the time I wish to do so. Maybe I'm thinking about this in the wrong way? <input onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'EmailsDropped', 'OnSubmit', 'HomePageTopDrop', '<?php theActuallEmailAddressValue; ?>']);"  type="submit" value="START WITH 5 FREE CASE STUDIES" > Any help greatly appreciated. This is reposted from here: https://plus.google.com/+DaveLlorens/posts/Vy4WGUa6Rr5 https://plus.google.com/s/%23eventtracking   https://plus.google.com/s/%23googleanalytics   https://plus.google.com/s/%23googleanalyticsacademy

• Answer:

  You will need to add a form submit handler in JavaScript that can capture the email address before the form is submitted. Then you can fire a Google analytics event with your values. After that let the form submission proceed. I would recommend using jQuery to do the dirty work.