Events are user interactions with specific elements of a website or app, which can be tracked and analyzed in Google Analytics. Examples include button clicks, video plays, form submissions, and downloads.
With Databox you can track all your metrics from various data sources in one place.
Events refer to specific actions users take on a website or within an app. These interactions are tracked and recorded to provide insights into user behavior.
Events play a crucial role in understanding how users interact with various elements on a website (or app) and can help businesses optimize their online presence and user experience.
They can encompass a wide range of actions, such as clicking on buttons, links, or videos, submitting forms, downloading files, playing media, social media shares, and more. Essentially, any action that you want to track and analyze can be considered an event.
Calculating events involves determining the total number of specific interactions that have occurred on a website within a given time frame.
But before you start doing the math, you need to specify which events you want to calculate. It can be clicks on buttons, downloads, form submissions, video plays, and more.
The formula is simple:
Total Events = Sum of the events for each specific action or interaction
Let’s say a website that sells products online tracks several events to monitor user engagement and collects the following event data in one week:
To calculate the total number of events for the week, you would use the formula:
Total Events = 2,500 (Add to Cart) + 1,200 (Downloads) + 800 (Newsletter sign-ups) = 4,500 events
In this example, the business had a total of 4,500 events recorded on its website for the week across the three specified interactions.
Of course, each business will value specific events more than others and readjust the formula based on their needs and goals.
Event tracking serves as a cornerstone for understanding user behavior and optimizing your website’s performance.
Only with accurate event tracking can you extract the valuable insights you need to make informed decisions, improve user experience, and drive desired outcomes.
But getting event tracking right can be tricky.
Below, we’ll go through some strategies that will help you improve your event tracking and get the most out of your website analytics:
More resources to help you improve:
Used to show a simple Metric or to draw attention to one key number.
Used to illustrate numerical proportions through the size of the slices.
Used to show comparisons between values.
Databox is a business analytics software that allows you to track and visualize your most important metrics from any data source in one centralized platform.
To track Events using Databox, follow these steps:
This dashboard uses Google Ads and Google Analytics to show the direct impact of paid ads on website traffic.
The events you should set up and focus on in GA4 will depend mostly on the needs and goals of your specific business.
For example, e-commerce businesses and hotel businesses will want to focus on different things.
That said, some events that could be useful across different industries include sign_up (signups for a web/app account), generate_lead (user submits a form), join_group (user joins a specific group), tutorial_begin (user begins a tutorial process during onboarding), and search (user searches for something specific on your website).
In Universal Analytics (UA), events were only a minor part of tracking user interactions. There were a lot of different hit types that captured interactions, while the measurement model primarily revolved around sessions and pageviews.
In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), on the other hand, every single interaction is considered an event.
There is no category, action, or label in GA4 like there was with UA and the entire data measurement model is event-based.
Sessions by Landing Page is a metric that shows the number of sessions (or visits) that started on a particular page of a website. It helps evaluate the effectiveness of different landing pages in attracting and engaging visitors.
The New Users metric in Google Analytics refers to the number of unique visitors who are visiting a particular website for the first time within a specified time period.
The Pageviews by Page metric is a count of how many times a specific page on a website has been viewed over a certain time period, typically a day or a month. It helps track the popularity of each page and can provide insights into user behavior and website performance.
The Goal Completion by Source metric shows the sources (e.g. search engines, social media, direct traffic) that generated the most conversions or goal completions on your website.
Goal Value by Source is a metric that helps you understand the value of your website traffic sources in terms of the goals you have set up in Google Analytics. It shows you how much revenue or other value was generated by users who came to your site via different sources such as organic search, social media, or paid advertising.
Goal Value is a metric in Google Analytics that helps you assign a specific financial value to each completed goal. By assigning a monetary value to each goal, you can track and measure the ROI of your online campaigns and better understand the profitability of your website.
The Revenue by Landing Page metric calculates the total amount of revenue generated from users who landed on a specific page of a website. It helps to identify the pages driving the most revenue, optimize those pages for better conversion rates, and understand customer behavior and preferences.
The Transactions per User metric counts the number of completed transactions divided by the number of unique users on a website. It helps measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and user engagement with the website's products or services.