What is event tracking and how does it help my business?

Google Event TrackingEvent Tracking is a very flexible way to track onsite campaigns and individual visitor actions on a web page. It can help you identify visitor behaviour to accurately measure traffic flow for specific things. This helps you to make more informed decisions around getting better engagement rates for your web marketing efforts, and improving the pathways to information on your website or other sites.

In a nutshell: if you can track visitor behaviour accurately around specific events, you can use this knowledge to your advantage.

Whilst Google Analytics provides various data around visitor behaviour, it is more focused on whole-page navigation, and does not break down which link on a page takes you to a common destination.

For, example, if you have a blue Get a Quote button at the top of your page and green button for getting a quote further down the page, you won’t know which one was clicked by visitors on that page.

Event Tracking allows you to see which one of the two links attracted more visitor clicks. If it is the green button getting all the action, then you know it is working better as a call to action. You might use this information by changing the top of the page button from blue to green.

Advantages of Event Tracking:

You get clean data – the information gathered is about specific actions instead of being muddied by unrelated page visits.

Availability of historical data – you can review last month’s campaign clicks even when you have changed the campaign.

It’s exportable – Unlike the rest of the data on Google analytics, you can export the data for Event tracking to Excel or other tools for further analysis.

You can add event tracking to slider links and other non-static content. This is much more important with the use of mobile page versions where you hide certain elements from visitors accessing your site from different devices.

There is no additional setup required in Google Analytics, you just add the instruction in the event code where to send it – or you can upload a plug-in that does the coding for you (applies to WordPress websites).

Disadvantages of Event Tracking:

It is harder to connect event tracking data with conversions, especially if you have a lot of different link paths to and from pages. This makes it more suitable as a tool for refining the content and design elements on your website to work in line with your visitor behaviour.

The visual expression of the data that you get with Google Analytics doesn’t apply to Event tracking reports, but you can always convert the data into more visually appealing graphs and charts once you have exported it.

Setting up event tracking requires some technical work up front. If you have a good level of computer savvy, you may be able to add the event tracking code to the link codes on your website yourself. Google has its own how-to tutorials on this, but they assume a rudimentary understanding of where and how to find the right code to update.

If you would rather not mess about with changing strings of code, you can pay someone with this skill set to do it for you, like your web designer or IT service provider.

Either way, it is a good idea to go through the basics first to determine what you want to learn about visitor behaviour so that you can determine the different categories, labels and values you will apply to the event tracking code.

Different Types of Event Tracking

You can track any type of action on your website For example:

  • mouse movements
  • clicks
  • scrolls
  • keyboard commands

The one that we believe can make the most impact for your business is track the click to call action on the mobile view of your site. This allows you to know how many people phone you with their mobile phones by clicking the call now button on your website.

More than any other link you could apply event tracking to, this will allow you to identify how many phone enquiries are coming to you directly from your website.

To clarify, a Call Now call to action is the mobile friendly call to action you can place on your website to allow visitors using mobile phones to phone your business directly from the website by clicking the link button.

Not only does this make it much easier and faster for people to contact you, effectively fast-tracking conversion from visitors to enquiries, with the addition of event tracking, you can actually measure how many people use the link to call your business.
Web Tonic regularly uses event tracking in our own and our clients’ websites. If you would like to introduce Event Tracking with your business website, contact us.