**Google Analytics is a powerhouse of information about how visitors are using your website. **
But if you simply install the tracking script and leave it at that, you are missing out on advanced functionality that can help you make important business decisions. An example of this is using event tracking. This guide will show you a quick and painless way to set it up.
Why use event tracking?
Whilst the standard Google Analytics code is very good at measuring data at the page level, interactions on your site that do not result in a new page view will not be measured. Examples of such user actions include:
– Clicking a play button on a video
– Clicking a ‘click to chat’ button
– Clicking on promotional banners on an ecommerce website
These user actions are can all be tracked using events.
Set up guide
There is just a small amount of Google Analytics code that you need to add to your links in order to track them. This can be divided into 4 main components:
– Category – This is how you organise events in your reports. You may call it *Videos, Click to chat, Banners, Downloads* etc
– Action – This a description of the particular event, for example on videos you may call it ‘Play’
– Label (optional) – This can be a further label to categorise or describe the visitor’s action, such as ‘home page video’, ‘sidebar link’ etc.
– Value (optional) – This is a numerical value that can be used to record things such as seconds or cost data.
There is a fifth optional field called **non-interaction**, that has a value simply of true or false. Normally Analytics would not consider it a ‘bounce’ if somebody interacts with the site. You can override this by selecting true.
Events in action
It is always easier to understand with an example, so here is how the code should look with the following components:
– Category = live chat
– Action = click to chat
– Label = sidebar chat link
*onClick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘live chat’, ‘click to chat’, ‘sidebar chat link’]);”*
Here is how the HTML would look as a link:
Finding your Report
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/event-tracking.png alt: Finding event tracking in Google Analytics menu)
Once you have added the event tracking code, you should automatically start seeing the reports appearing in the ‘Events’ section of your Analytics account. You can find this under ‘Content’ in the left hand column.
Studying the ‘Overview’ report will give you the big picture and you are then able to drill down into each category of event from here. This is why it is important to maintain a consistent naming policy when setting up your event categories, actions and labels.
The ‘Pages’ report is useful to see which pages have most user interaction. This can be particularly useful if you have sitewide elements, such as a sidebar promotion banner, and you wish to see which page had the most clicks.
Setting events as an Analytics Goal
Sometimes you may wish to see events pulled through to the Goals section of Analytics, to enable consistent reporting. For instance, you may wish to display your ‘click to chat’ data alongside all of your other enquiry goals such as form submissions.