Event tracking is an essential part of your website data collection architecture. Apart from tracking pageviews and demographic details about your users, you can get more granular and capture specific actions that your users take on your site with event tracking.
Let’s back up a little bit and explain how event tracking is beneficial if you’re using Google Analytics 4 (GA4). GA4 collects and processes data as events. This means that everything that every main website interaction sent to your GA4 property is considered an ‘event’ containing ‘event parameters’ that contain details about that specific event, or website interaction.
Within the GA4 platform, you can analyze how many users trigger these events and event parameters so that you can understand which actions are most popular amongst your users, what site features lead to more conversions and attention from your audience, and much more.
As an example, below we can see how many times users signed up for a newsletter (‘event count’ metric), what the newsletter type is (‘newsletter type’ dimension), and how many users triggered this event (‘total users’ metric).
What Events Should I Track?
So what actions should be tracked, then? It’s important to note that more is not necessarily better when it comes to event tracking. You should not have to track every single action that can be taken on your site as an event just because it’s possible. The reason for this is because it can over saturate your property with data that is not being used by your team and divert development and engineering resources to implementing events that may not be useful. The key with event tracking is to only track actions that will serve a purpose in your reporting.
Apart from standard events, some useful interactions to track are:
- Form Submissions: Any forms on your website, such as contact us forms or webinar registration forms, that give a strong indication of a potential customer.
- Newsletter Registrations: Subscription sign-ups are a good way to measure how involved users want to be with your brand.
- Account Registration and Sign-Ins: Similar to newsletter registrations, account registrations and sign-ins indicate a user’s intention to potentially return to your site and perform a conversion action.
- Menu Navigation Clicks: Tracking the menu items users click on serves as a way to understand what category of products, services, or content your users are navigating to.
If you’re unsure what interactions you would want to track, I encourage you to navigate your site in the way a potential customer would. What calls your attention? Do you find yourself swiping through product carousels? Are you using filters to narrow down your search? Are you reading product reviews to determine whether you would want to buy a product?
Going through this exercise can shed light on key user actions that can benefit your reporting. As mentioned before, the events you collect should serve a purpose and help answer at least one of your business questions.
