One of the features of that I’ve had the joy of experimenting with was sending Events to Google Analytics. There are so many particle situations that events can be used to track.
The Advantages of Event Tracking
There are quite a few advantages for using event tracking on your site. The main goal is to see key interactions that users have with your website that might not be easy to see with just the typical page views. Some common interactions worth tracking would be:
- Form Submissions
- Videos
- Interacting with specific elements (like phone numbers or buttons)
- And many more!
Once you get a full grasp on how universal the event tracking script is, you can use it on nearly any interaction that can be captured by JavaScript.
Practical Examples
I started looking into Event tracking originally when I noticed that on some websites, our forms were being tracked by page views of the thank you pages. That’s fine for just a single form, but some of our client websites had 2 or 3 different kinds of forms that we were trying to track separately. It got kind of ridiculous when we have pages like “/thank/”, “/thank-you/”, and “/thank-you-contact/” all on the same website. This can get messy if you forget to noindex these pages, not to mention if they are all basically the same content that needs to be updated. Using the Event Label property allows to uniquely separate events send from different forms without having to use different thank you pages.
Another great aspect of event tracking with forms is that the events can be refined down to the page they were sent. So when you have a single sidebar form on multiple pages, you can refine the data on that forms events to see which pages they came from. Being able to tell which pages the sidebar is filled out on can tell you which pages make users want to contact you or request that quote, and which pages do not.
Another example of something that I’ve personally coded out was sending events to Google Analytics when a user scrolls a webpage down past a certain point. This is really useful for landing pages to see how far down your captured users actually go down the page. If they aren’t scrolling down after a certain part, then maybe it should be time to reconsider making the content more appealing above that point. This can help make those users more enticed to go down the page further.
