{"id":240,"date":"2023-03-14T16:21:41","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T16:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/?p=240"},"modified":"2023-03-22T18:02:18","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T18:02:18","slug":"the-ultimate-guide-to-google-analytics-event-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/the-ultimate-guide-to-google-analytics-event-tracking\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Guide To Google Analytics Event Tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The following is a guest post by Future Buzz community member\u00a0Ed Baxter.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Event tracking in Analytics is awesome! There really is no other word to describe it, so it\u2019s unfortunate when it feels like everyone isn\u2019t making the most out of an amazing resource built directly into Google Analytics. With that in mind, I wanted to share some of the ways that I use event tracking on real projects\u2026<\/p>\n<h2>For those who haven\u2019t used event tracking before\u2026<\/h2>\n<p>(read on to know the score!)<\/p>\n<p>Event tracking is very simple to set up. It takes just one line of code to fire an event to Google to track something; this could be a PDF download, a video play and so on. The code required to track an event is shown below:<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As you can see, a typical Event is made up of several simple parts.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First we make a push to Google and tell it we are tracking an event.<\/li>\n<li>Then we are telling Google the category name; for the contact email link I\u2019ve assigned it to the category of \u201cContact\u201d.<\/li>\n<li>Then we tell Google the action taken. In this example the user has clicked the email link, so I\u2019ve call this \u201cClick Link\u201d.<\/li>\n<li>Then we are attaching a label to the event. I\u2019ve set this as \u201cContact Page Sidebar\u201d. On the real page, it has several links to the contact email address, so by using the label I\u2019ve allowed more detailed tracking in Analytics. This is especially handy for working out which email links are being most effective.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The 4<sup>th<\/sup>\u00a0option hasn\u2019t been included in the example however it allows you indicate the event will not be used in the bounce rate calculation. We\u2019ll come back to this later.<\/p>\n<p>If you are new to event tracking then I\u2019d suggest you check out\u00a0Google\u2019s official page\u00a0for it, it has all the information you need to start tracking your events!<\/p>\n<h2>Event tracking in the real world<\/h2>\n<p>Now we\u2019re all up to speed we can get stuck into the good stuff. Events can be used in all sorts of clever ways to add that additional level of detail. Here are just a few:<\/p>\n<h3>Downloads<\/h3>\n<p>Downloads to files typically aren\u2019t tracked in Analytics by default. They don\u2019t fire the tracking code and thus don\u2019t show up in your reports. Not ideal! However, you can attach event tracking code to them and start measuring your downloads.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>Outbound Links<\/h3>\n<p>Ever wondered how much traffic you are referring to various websites? Event tracking on outbound links is a great way to measure this.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>Live Help<\/h3>\n<p>Many ecommerce sites use\u00a0<em>live help<\/em>\u00a0to aid their customers when making purchases or by answering their questions directly and quickly. Many of these systems don\u2019t natively integrate with Analytics however we can attach a click event to the live help link.<\/p>\n<h3>Baskets and Checkouts<\/h3>\n<p>Many websites have multiple links to their Checkout page or their Add To Cart page. Event tracking can be used to see where users are actually clicking on the page.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In the image above, event tracking is used to track where visitors are adding products to the cart from. In this case, they are adding from the category page.<\/p>\n<h3>Error Reporting<\/h3>\n<p>Tracking where users are having issues on your site is highly important if you\u2019re interesting in improving your conversion rate. Let\u2019s consider a typical checkout by a user: they go first to the checkout page, enter all their details, hit the submit button and then get an error on their email address or their post code. By default, Analytics doesn\u2019t track this error; it will show another pageview but nothing more.<\/p>\n<p>By firing an event, we can see what is causing issues when people progress through our forms. Over time we can see areas of the form that are problematic and take steps to correct them.<\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<h3>Video Plays<\/h3>\n<p>If you host your own videos then you can also use event tracking to see how often they are being watched.<\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<p><em>Get events working with goals<\/em><\/p>\n<p>An added bonus to events is that they can be used to create goals. Rather than setting a URL destination or a visit duration you can carefully select what type of events you\u2019d like to track as a goal as shown below\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Use event tracking for the right reasons<\/h2>\n<p>Now we\u2019ve looked at a good number of real world uses of events you might notice that it\u2019s possible to get carried away with them. Events are powerful but they aren\u2019t always the right solution to track what you need.<\/p>\n<p>Virtual pageviews, for example, are another fantastic way of tracking data that is usually hidden. You tell Google a specific page has been viewed by using the code below:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>This is very handy if you wanted to track an accordion checkout page which shows multiple sections but doesn\u2019t \u201cleave\u201d the page.<\/p>\n<p>Knowing when to use events or when to use virtual page views is very important if you want to keep your data clean. I recommend\u00a0checking out this article.<\/p>\n<p>I hope this has provided you with a better understanding of events and where you can use them. Because data is so important, it\u2019s vital that we collect as much of it as possible to see how visitors are using our site and where we can improve.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you have any other nifty ways of using events then I\u2019d love to hear about them in the comments below.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is a guest post by Future Buzz community member\u00a0Ed Baxter. Event tracking in Analytics is awesome! There really &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"The Ultimate Guide To Google Analytics Event Tracking\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/the-ultimate-guide-to-google-analytics-event-tracking\/#more-240\" aria-label=\"More on The Ultimate Guide To Google Analytics Event Tracking\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1290,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz","category-digital-marketing-and-pr","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}