How to measure results using Event Tracking

It’s all well and good designing, developing and marketing a website, but without knowing exactly how the website performs you’re probably not getting the best possible return… That’s where Google’s event tracking comes in.

When driving traffic to a website we’re able to track all sorts of useful metrics with Google Analytics, which gives us an insight into where a visitor’s come from, how long they spent on the site, which pages they’ve visited and most importantly if they convert into a lead or sale!

Event tracking allows you to track the performance of specific elements of a site and analyse data that you wouldn’t normally be able to see when using Google’s Analytics default metrics. For example:

• Button Clicks

• Call to action usage

• Downloads

• Video plays

• Advert clicks

• Image gallery usage

• Slider usage

• Many, many more…

You’d think such a useful feature would be difficult or time consuming to implement but event tracking is very easy to setup and will start tracking events instantly.

Here’s the code we recently used to track how frequently visitors interacted with a ‘contact us’ call to action, which displayed on every page of the website.

‘onclick=”ga(‘click’, ‘button’, ‘cta’, ‘contact_us’);”

The code is fairly self-explanatory: We wanted to track a ‘click’ on a ‘button’ which was a ‘cta’ called ‘contact_us’

Simply rename the attributes to track a different element of the site. For example here’s how we’d rename the code to measure when a visitor plays a video on the about us page:

‘onclick=”ga(‘click’, ‘button’, ‘about_us’, ‘video’, play’);”

Finally, you need to add the event tracking code to the element you want to track on your site. For example, here’s how we’d add the code to a ‘contact us’ call to action button, which links to a ‘contact us’ page.

<a href=http://www.test-website.com/contact-us/ ‘onclick=”ga(‘click’, ‘button’, ‘cta’, ‘contact_us’);”>

That’s it! Events will start tracking as soon as you’ve implemented the code on your site.

To view the data you’ve tracked in Google Analytics go to > Behaviour > Events > Overview

If you’d like to know more about how we use event tracking to optimise our client’s websites to improve performance and generate results, call us for a chat. And yes, we’re tracking that.