Tracking is like rowing a boat although you control the oars without a destination you are lost. Event tracking on Google Analytics is your oar when it comes to measuring what’s happening on the page. Efficient tracking starts with a clear pre-set of goals to achieve.
An event is made up of the following components:
- Event Category: The object that user interacted with on the page. (e.g. Video)
- Event Action: The type of interaction with the object. (e.g. Play)
- Event Labels: Labels are useful for categorizing events. (e.g. summer campaign)
- Value: Value could be a numeric value associated with the object. (e.g. time in seconds for the player to load)
5 Best Practices for Event Tracking on Google Analytics
Determine which events you want to track
Efficient tracking starts with identifying in advance all elements that you would want to track. If you are an e-commerce website, you would want to track elements like add to cart, remove from cart, buy now, sign-up and other critical elements. Even if start with tracking only a single object on your website. It is essential to identify all the objects/events that you want to track on the site. Clarity on all objects/events to track will enable you to arrive at a report structure that scales up as your website expands its content as well as visitors.
Plan Structure of Event Tracking Report in advance
During Event Tracking, implementation phase factor the different stakeholders involved and structure the reports accordingly. For example, your business team would want to track business-related objects/events like add to cart, buy now, etc while your product team would want to track objects/events associated with engagement & usage of the website.
Knowing the structure in advance will allow you filter Event Categories accordingly for Event Tracking implementation.
Consistent naming nomenclature
Adopt a consistent naming nomenclature for Event Categories & Event Actions. For example, if you can Event Category named ‘Purchase’ make sure that all purchase-related actions are sorted under the Event Category. Event Category & Event Actions pair up as a unique element when it comes to reporting hence identify metrics that belong to the similar category before you began implementation.
bounce rate impact & using non-interaction events
Bounce rate is termed as a single-page session when the user visits a single page on your website and then exists the page without taking any action. If you implement event tracking on your site, then you might notice a dip in bounce rate metrics for the selected page. Google Analytics considers event tracking as an interaction request. Post implementing event tracking on a page bounce rate would be termed as a single-page session without any interactions on the objects/events configured for event tracking.
If you don’t event tracking to impact bounce rate you can use an optional parameter which allows excluding certain events as interactions when bounce rate is calculated for the page. During event tracking implementation stage you have to identify which objects/events have to be categorized as ‘Non-interaction’ events and the value for such requests have to be set to true to make sure that such events are not considered as interaction hits.
Event session restrictions
First, ten event hits sent to Google Analytics are tracked immediately post which tracking is limited to one hit per second. If you are events per sessions reaches its threshold then additional events will not be tracked. To overcome sessions restrictions, it’s important that you avoid excessive scripting on videos, mouse movement tracking and avoid time-lapse mechanisms that generate a large number of event hits.
