How to Set Up Event Tracking

Google Analytics’ Event Tracking allows you to easily track user behavior on your website by counting clicks and other actions that visitors do. While we have discussed Event Tracking in the past today we will focus on naming conventions and the strategy for setting them up.

What to Tag With Event Tracking

First off, did you know Google Analytics has a hit limit of 10 million per property per month? For most regular websites this is never an issue, but as you start adding a lot of advanced tagging you may start coming close, so just keep an eye on your usage statistics. That being said, we like to tag just about everything! You never know what you may want to do analysis on so why not track everything you can? Anything that can be clicked that is not an internal link OR is some sort of button or action we want to group together gets an event tag in our book.

How to Name Event Tracking Tags

There are four main naming variables within each event; Category, Action, Label and Value. All are text oriented except for value, this is an integer only. The goal for naming events is to do so in such a way that groups or aggregates them for reporting purposes. For example, “Shopping Cart Buttons” could be the Category for every button within the shopping cart funnel. The Action is often tagged as a “Click”. I despise this strategy because you only have three text fields so why use up one on something as useless as “Click”? In our shopping cart example, maybe Action could be “Continue” or “Add Promo Code”. Obviously this is vastly more helpful than knowing if someone simply clicked a button. Lastly there are Labels. We typically use this variable to track Page Path. We do this so that we can understand what buttons visitors are click8ng on individual pages. Remember that each event group can be viewed individually or together. This means you can look at all Actions that fired on the entire website or just the Actions within a single Category.

Hopefully this helps guide you through your Event Tracking naming conventions, but if you need more help feel free to give us a shout!