Google Analytics Feature Activation: Event Tracking
This simple phrase means a lot. It means Google is enabling another feature that raise the bar to a new level and continues to significantly alter the playing field for any low to mid end competitors.
We are not bound to measure page views, visits and visitors anymore. We can truly measure significant activities going on our sites regardless of the way we decide to implement them: AJAX, Flash, Silverlight, widgets or others. Although there was ways to track downloads, video plays and other tricks using the regular page views, the side affect was also that some reports and metrics were affected. With events, a page view is a page view and an event is clearly an event.
Using event tracking
- Update your ga.js file
- Use the _trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value) function in your code.
- The category is pretty obvious: Videos, Download, etc.
- Action should be something like "Play", "Pause", "Stop", or a timestamp
- The label allows you to distinguish, for example, which video is being played
- The value is a way to tell Google Analytics about a timestamp, a count, or any numeric value that will be summed and averaged for each action and label
- See the results under Content/Event Tracking in Google Analytics
Other cool stuff
A set of new event timer functions _recordStartTime(), _recordEndTime() and mouse over event tracking _trackMouseOver(). I can already imagine scenarios where those calls will come in handy!Caveats
- Max of 500 events per visit... however, this should be plenty!
- If an event is fired on the first page of a visit, the visit will never be counted as a bounce. A bounce is usually defined as being a single page view, but since you fire an event, there are now two things happening, thus this visit isn't a bounce anymore. That one is a bit more tricky and could significantly affect some reports, segmentation and other calculations.
8 comments:
I have no problem with events cancelling out Bounce Rate, since the latter has always meant absence of action from the visitor (even a page view is a click after all). So to me, if a visitor sees only one page but clicks on some stuff, it's engaged enough to be left out of the Bounce Rate.
Jacques: I agree, but the thing is you could fire an event even if the user is not doing anything significant. For example, a video starting to play automatically could fire _trackEvent("Video","Play","video title") and screw up the stats.
Of course, then, well, it's up to you (the organization) to skew your stats or not.
You could still use the exit ratio to have some meaningful information no? I know it is not the same as a bounce, but it still give you something to work with.
Sebastien: you might be right, exit ratio would still be useful. However, I would hate to skew my stats because of events and deviate from "standard" implementation.
With regards to bounces and interactions, I tend to code my events with some sort of naming convention that signifies user or auto triggered. That way, you can simply filter out any auto-triggered events in a profile if you want to have a true interactive bounce rate.
This is a very cool addition to GA.
Its a shame events can't be used in goals and funnels. This is a significant flaw in the new approach.
Post a Comment