Google Universal Analytics - Event Tracking - setTimeout not working using fieldsObject method

Question

I do not understand why this works;

ga('send', 'pageview'); 
setTimeout("ga('send','event','Engagement','SessionPing','30s')", 30000);

And this does not work

ga('send', 'pageview'); 
setTimeout("ga('send',{
  hitType: 'event',
  eventCategory: 'Engagement',
  eventAction: 'SessionPing',
  eventLabel: '30s'
})", 30000);

Can anyone explain why one would work and not the other? The second method seems to prevent GA from firing completely and I recorded no data for several days - the error message shown Google's Chrome Tag Assistant is that javascript file has not loaded.

I'd like to know because I want to get a better understanding of GA and javascript - this makes no sense to me, I can not see any syntax or format errors in the second method.

Answer 1

The JavaScript syntax is wrong. Basically, you are using a string as the first argument of setTimeout and when you are breaking it to multiple lines, you are not doing it properly. The first argument of setTimeout is a function and it can be referenced in multiple ways as mentioned here.

If you want it to be a string, then it should either be:

 setTimeout("ga('send','event','Engagement','SessionPing','30s')", 30000);

or if you want to split to multiple lines, (observe the double quotes)

setTimeout("ga('spaTracker.send', {" +
          "hitType: 'event', " +
          "eventCategory: 'Engagement', " +
          "eventAction: 'SessionPing', " +
          "eventLabel: '30s'" +
          "})", 30000);

You can also split it like this:

setTimeout("ga('spaTracker.send', { \
          hitType: 'event', \
          eventCategory: 'Engagement', \
          eventAction: 'SessionPing', \
          eventLabel: '30s' \
      })", 5000);

If you want to keep it as a function, then it should either be:

setTimeout(ga('send','event','Engagement','SessionPing','30s'), 30000);

or:

setTimeout(ga('spaTracker.send', {
          hitType: 'event',
          eventCategory: 'Engagement',
          eventAction: 'SessionPing',
          eventLabel: '30s'
      }), 30000);