Hopefully you’re arriving at this article to learn more about what “Events” are when it comes to analytics. If you’re not and just more curious in general about analytics or how to track your website traffic, go check out Google Analytics and get that installed on your website first. Should you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team and we’d be happy to help out. For the rest of you, continue reading below.
What are Events as it relates to analytics?
Think of an event as an action that occurs on your website. That action typically occurs with a click of the mouse and can be attributed to buttons, form fields, etc. In this article we’re not going to provide a tutorial to set these up as a simple search on Google will provide a more thorough explanation than we ever could but we will explain the importance of them.
How does event tracking work?
It all starts with adding a snippet of code to a particular element on your website. That snippet of code will require a category, action and you have the option to also provide a label and value. Below is a sample of what that could look like on a simple link:
<a href=”https://lenderd.com/contact/” onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”>Link Text</a>
You simply replace the Category, Action, etc. values above with your own custom values and can begin tracking events across your website. Providing a consistent naming convention for these items will help you stay organized so please take that into consideration when labeling these elements.
Beyond standard links/buttons, these events can also be added to form fields and if doing all this sounds a bit beyond your pay-grade, Google also has the functionality to automatically apply these through their tag manager which we may cover at a later date.
So why is this data important?
Quite simply it provides somewhat of a heat map of the user interaction on your website. Knowing what your users are clicking and how often is invaluable and should inform any future alterations you make to your website. Imagine spending a bunch of your time crafting, what you think, is the perfect CTA(call-to-action) and then finding out after a month of two that 1-2% of your users are clicking on it. As much as that would suck, it would suck much more continuing to alter and tweak that item without any data to tell you whether it’s working or not.
The same goes for web forms. Setup some events on your lead capture forms. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if your users are starting your lead form and not completing it and also where they seem to abandon the form? Data is very powerful and when turned into actionable items can make a dramatic difference on any website.
Hopefully you enjoyed learning more about events and if you’d like to explore the possibility of adding them to your website contact us today!
