My notes from the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries:

Split testing often uncovers surprising things. Many features that make the product better in the eyes of engineers and designers have no impact on customer behavior.

Are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original specific strategic hypothesis is correct or do we need to make a mayor change. That change is called a PIVOT – a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and the engine of growth.

Single piece flow – one envelope at a time. It works because of a surprising power of small batches.

It matters how fast you can get through the entire loop of build measure learn.

I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

Well, the question is in the title. I searched SO (obviously) but nothing similar came up. Additional reading material (if you happen to know one) will be helpful to solve this mystery for me.

The answer, by user Eike Pierstorff, was:

No, not by default at least.

It is technically possible to contrive a serverside solution that measures referenced assets. But usually (i.e. when you use the javascript tracking code) Google Analytics will only measure documents that have the tracking code embedded. Since you cannot embed javascript code in image files they will not be tracked.

If you want to see which images have been called from other domains you can instead have a look in your webservers access logs which keeps track of all requests to your server and usually includes the address of the referring site.