Now let's talk about Event Tracking. And Event Tracking is all about the
interactions that actually happen on your page because with the Google
Analytics installation that we have running right now Google Analytics will
only register data if the user generates a new page view. So if he goes from one
to the other page that would be recorded as an interaction because we actually
had two page loads. Now what about all the other interactions that a user can
take on a page like scrolling or he could send off a newsletter form without
actually changing the site, then Google Analytics won't receive any data and
this interaction point would be lost. And this is where event tracking comes in.
Now first of all, what can be tracked with event tracking. Just to give you an
example here; Clicks, Form Submits, Form Focuses which are really good for
finding out if somebody abandons your forms that you have on your page, we can
track Keyboard-Actions, Scrolling, if somebody's actually Active on the tab,
and so on and so on. And this really comes down to your imagination and the
capabilities of JavaScript or the libraries like jQuery. But even
server-side you can send information over to the page that then triggers an
event. So it's really about what does the event that I want to send over tell me
about the user and what insights can I get from this information. And you can
send over a lot of things already with plain JavaScript or with the library
jQuery. There are a lot of event calls that you
can attach your event tracking information to. An event tracking is
really not about any configurations that you make within your Google Analytics
account. It's more about the data that we send it into Google Analytics. So the
normal code that we install on all our pages that sends over the page view
information and now we want to send in event information. But we don't want to
send it on all the time, only on certain JavaScript events. So for example here, a
manual approach would be to install that onto your links so you'll be able to
register somebody clicked on a link. And important properties are here that you
need to define a category and action and optionally you can put a label or value
in place. Then you couple that up with an JavaScript event call and your link is
tracked. As soon as somebody clicks on it, it will send over an event to Google
Analytics. Now I realize that some of you don't have direct access to the website
or all its links and it might also be a little bit tedious to check all these
links so what I would encourage you to try out Google Tag Manager because once
you install the code it will give you the capability to track certain
interactions on the page automatically and I'll show you in a second how to set
that up. But it's safe to say yes event tracking it is a little bit more work to
set up and customize the installation of the Google Analytics account. But as I
said at the beginning in the goal section, you can also connect the event
with goal and it can be very very actionable when you think about that. So
for example, somebody clicked on a certain button and you want to track
that micro event maybe and later find out if you bought the product so you
could track that with event tracking and connect the data to a goal. So event
tracking is really really important for Google Analytics
and it shows that you have truly customized an installation to the
website that it's connected to. Now let's take a look on how to install event
tracking on a page. So back at our demo site, I have made up a little bit of an
example here. This is a blog post where I've posted two links one is Google Tag
Manager and one is Manually. And when we click on this link Manual and I'll keep
the command key pressed so it actually opens up in a new tab, this should have
fired an event call. Let's go over to Google Analytics and into the real-time
reporting and we have a tab here called Events. We see there was just an event
fired with event category linked, and the event action manual if you click
into that we can even see the label I think. The event label is home page. And
you'll be able to find all the events within the behavior and event report
here. So now let's talk take a look on how I implemented this. You can see
beneath that the actual source code so if I inspect this element with
right-click within Google Chrome, I see exactly what we have here and see I just
took an ordinary link which is an ahref and attached the property on click GA
send an event with the category link, the action manual, and the label home page.
And as soon as somebody clicks on that link this will be sent over to Google
Analytics.