Event Tracking

An event is a user interaction on your website. Event tracking is one of the most underused metrics in Google Analytics (GA) because it is not automatic. The user must define the event and place a code on the webpage to tell GA what action to track. Event tracking can track the following types of events:

• “User interactions, such as:
• ·      File downloads
• ·      Newsletter / RSS Subscriptions
• ·      Product ratings
• ·      Social Actions (Like, Share)
• ·      User comments
• ·      Form error tracking
• ·      Video plays

·      Clicks on meaningful page elements (e.g. the ‘register’ button on your register form).

And non-user interactions such as:

• ·      Popup opening (e.g. requesting newsletter subscription)
• ·      Auto video play (how long did the video play for? 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, 100%)
• ·      Auto slideshow slide charge
• ·      Javascript exceptions  (Sanela, 2014)”

The results from event tracking can show you a user’s actions when moving through pages on your site and how the user completed those actions. For example, did the user download a PDF from a popup or a sidebar? Measuring user interaction with your site will allow you to segment users with similar behavior to retarget them with future marketing campaigns (Sanela, 2014).

Party Pieces, an online vendor for party supplies, is an example of a real business using event tracking to their benefit. Party Pieces wanted a greater understanding of their customers and discover which products drove engagement. To do this, the company used GA events tracking to track when users clicked “buy now”, “add to wishlist” or “email to a friend” (Jellyfish, n.d.).

Screenshot of Customer Interactions for Party Pieces.
Image source: (Jellyfish, n.d.). http://www.jellyfish.net/analytics/analytics-case-studies/party-pieces/

By tracking events to follow users’ actions on product pages, Party Pieces could see which products were driving engagement on their website. These results (see the sample report below) helped the company learn more about their customers and make smart decisions about the website and inventory (Jellyfish, n.d.).

Sample interaction event report for Party Pieces.
Image source: (Jellyfish, n.d.) http://www.jellyfish.net/analytics/analytics-case-studies/party-pieces/

Using event tracking to monitor outbound links can tell you where your visitors when they click an external link on your site (see a sample report below). You can improve visitor interaction with your social media channels or look for advertising opportunities on sites that get a lot of traffic from your website (Sanela, 2014).

Image source: (Sanela, 2014).

Using event tracking to track product clicks on your website after a layout change can tell you how the change affects users’ interest in your products by comparing the pre-change metrics to the post-change metrics (Sanela, 2014).

Landing pages often have high bounce rates because so many users don’t convert. You can use an interaction event to reduce a page’s bounce rate. By setting an interaction event to count the first 15 seconds a user spends on your landing page, you see an indication that this user is interested in the offer and you can segment this user for remarketing (Sanela, 2014).

Event tracking can also show you the number of downloads for external files on your site, like PDFs or compressed files. Event tracking can report the users who respond to popup messages on a web page. You can then use that data to see the affect of the popup on your conversion rate (Sanela, 2014).

You can use event tracking to form completion errors and abandonment rates. This error reporting can pinpoint a field that has the most user errors, showing you where improvements are needed. An event tracking error form will look like this:

Sample event tracking error report. Image source: (Sanela, 2014)

            It takes additional effort to learn how to set up event tracking as part of your web metrics, but as you can see the resulting data is definitely worth the effort.

Sources:

Jellyfish. (n.d.). Party Pieces case study. Retrieved from http://www.jellyfish.net/analytics/analytics-case-studies/party-pieces/

Sanela, Y. (2014, Dec. 21). Events tracking – The hidden joker of Google Analytics. Seperia Digital Marketing blog. Retrieved from http://www.seperia.com/blog/event-tracking-the-hidden-joker-of-google-analytics/