Events – Actions Beyond Page Views

Today’s online experience goes beyond simple page views; nowadays, to really engage users, sites must also employ multimedia like videos and interactivity like tools that allow customers to customize products. All these features are important indicators of site engagement, but since they don’t operate like standard html pages, they can’t be tracked as such. Enter events and event tracking.  

Video

As analytics guru Avinash Kaushik writes in Web Analytics 2.0, event tracking “creates new metrics that capture the unique experience of rich media” (2010, p. 123).

One of the most dominant forms of rich media on the Web right now is video. Television network PBS wanted to know what kind of videos their Web users were viewing and in what ways, and so they turned to Luna Metrics and the event tracking functionality of Google Analytics. Armed with the information they found, they made the business decision to create two new video portals – a standard one and one especially for kids. 

Downloads, Galleries and Tools

But rich media is just one of the categories of interactions event tracking can keep tabs on. Kayden Kelly lists several others in one of his blog posts, including printing pages, downloading pdfs, interacting with a rotating slideshow/photo gallery or using site tools like calculators, quizzes, etc.  

Being able to track these important actions is crucial to the success of any site. Oftentimes downloads are a key conversion goal on a landing page and so must be trackable. Knowing which of a slideshow’s images/content resonates the most helps a site better tailor its galleries moving forward. 

In the case of interactive tools or widgets, it isn’t enough to know that users land on the pages that contain them; much insight can be gleaned if a site analyst has access to if and how visitors use them. Kaushik uses Toyota’s Adobe-Flash-driven interactive car configurator tool as an example (2010, p. 123). Upon seeing the data that customers most often chose to customize the transmission (over more vain, less important features like color), the company rethought its perceptions of and marketing to its audience (Kaushik, 2010).  

Same-Page Calls to Action

Event tracking results can also force site developers to rethink their calls to action. The Moz Blog gives the example of their sister site, SEOmoz.org (Henry, 2010). That site had a page that included two very different looking calls to action, but which each took visitors to the same page. So if the referral page and the destination page are the same, how could developers know which CTA was performing better? That’s right – make each one a unique trackable event and then compare the data. 

SEOmoz.org used event tracking to see which of the two highlighted calls to action (both of which led to the same page destination) was performing better.

Everyday vs. Special Events

It seems like there was a time, not long ago, when events and event tracking were considered “advanced” analytics -- not anymore. As the Web, its content and its level of interactivity have all grown more sophisticated, so too have the metrics used to describe them. Events are no longer special but just ordinary and everyday, which may be how often you’ll use them to guide your site decisions.