Events Report

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is the Events Report?

Digital marketers can use event tracking to track the non-standard actions that people take on their websites – actions like pressing the play button on a video, or clicking a button. Neither of these actions generates a ‘thank-you page’, so they can't be tracked using standard goal set-up methods.

However, these events are important, so they need to be tracked using another method. This method is called Event Tracking and it requires additional set-up or coding to implement.

The Events Report records how users interact with various elements of your website. This report will automatically track any Google Analytics events you have set up in your website code or through Google Tag Manager.

A benefit of event tracking is that it provides valuable insights into how users are interacting with your website and content. For example, it shows if they are clicking through to emails or external links, downloading brochures, guides or PDFs, viewing or partially viewing videos, and more. These insights can inform your website copy and layout, CTAs, and wider content strategies.

Variables to consider

As event tracking is tracking non-standard actions, it requires some additional set-up. To set up event tracking, you will need to ask your web developer to insert a piece of code into the item you want to track, such as a play button on a video, or some other piece of functionality.

Ask the developer to push two essential Google Analytics variables when someone clicks or scrolls. These variables are ‘eventCategory’ and ‘eventAction’. You might also want to include two other optional pieces of code, ‘eventLabel’ and ‘eventValue’.

Once the developer sets the website up to push these pieces of code to Google Analytics – when, for example, someone presses the play button – Google Analytics will pick up the data and record the event in the reports.

As with all of your data tracking and planning, it is important to be consistent in the naming conventions you use, so that you can easily view event performance via the Category, Action, or Label reports.

Overview sub-report

You can view website events overview information through the Overview sub-report. This report shows information on any event types and values you have coded into your website in one single view. If there are no events coded into your website, no data will appear here.

Once everything is tracked via the website code or using Google Tag Manager, you can view Top Events to see the most common events on your website.

The Experiments feature

Another non-standard feature of Google Analytics is the Experiments feature. This allows digital marketers to view and manage A/B tests for page performance. You can use this feature to test new layouts, content types, and formats, and to measure them against KPIs.

To use this feature, follow the set-up guide in Experiments. Then, you can set up test landing pages on your website subdomain and dynamically serve them to website visitors, to test engagement or conversion data. You can also set the length of the test and the percentage of visitors to be tested.

When the test is complete, you will have a data table indicating whether the original or the test pages perform better. With this data, you can decide whether to introduce a new landing page or to stick with the original.