EVENTS AND CONVERSIONS

In cxl institute, we learnt Event and Conversions

Conversion goals are success events that occur on your website. They represent key actions that users take on your site and they are typically represented by reaching a certain page. For example, a simple conversion to understand is successfully buying something on an e-commerce website. The “Thank You” page would be your conversion goal (page-wise) and can be tracked in Google Analytics by using the URL destination. Now, that specific conversion (a purchase) would be achieved after going through a multi-step process to reach the goal

Conversions are user activities that contribute to the success of your business. Examples of conversions include making a purchase (for an e-commerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

Events also represent important actions on your website. The core difference between events and conversion goals is that events are typically tied to website elements and not reaching certain pages (or URL destinations). Event Tracking has become more important in recent years as web technologies have evolved and websites now rely on non-page view events more often. For example, tracking AJAX or Flash-based applications that don’t rely on refreshing the page. Instead, they load data on-demand via form elements or links. Event tracking enables you to tag specific actions on your site (such as links or buttons) and then view granular reporting for those actions. Examples of events include clicking a link to download a pdf, clicking the play button in a video, tracking specific form elements like radio buttons, clicking a link on a webpage that dynamically loads additional information, etc. Event tracking is extremely versatile and the strategies I develop often include a number of events to track (again, the actual events are based on the site at hand).

One of the core benefits of event tracking in Google Analytics is the ability to categorize each event. When you tag an event, you can add a Category, Action, and Label in the code (with Category and Action being required). This enables you to logically categorize each event that’s triggered. For example, a rewind button in a video of a keynote presentation might be categorized like:

Category: Videos

Actions: Rewind

Label: Keynote2010

This would enable you to quickly view reporting for all video events, then rewind click actions across videos, and then which videos triggered those actions. A structure like this comes in very handy when you a lot of videos on your site and you want to view how many people are rewinding specific videos.

In Google Analytics 4 properties, you measure these activities using conversion events. (In a Universal Analytics property, you use goals to measure similar activities.

About conversion events

The data we see in Google Analytics 4 reports comes from events that are triggered as users interact with our website and/or app. Google Analytics 4 properties mark four automatically collected events as conversions

An event is a user’s interaction or activity with a website element that is tracked in Google Analytics.

This could be tracking clicks on a phone number, on a Call to action button, downloading a PDF file, using an external link, etc.

What are the best practices for Event tracking?

Before you decide to go ahead with Event tracking, there are few best practices that you should follow which will help you in understanding the data insights once the Event tracking is enabled.

>> Strategise which elements you would like to track as events. Remember there are many elements which are tracked by default in Google Analytics code like pageviews. Ensure event tracking is for those elements which are not readily available in the GA reports.

>> Adopting a clean naming protocol for Event tracking helps in reading and reporting for data. Planning the events before implementation is the key.

>> Deciding how the event tracking will be implemented? Whether by using manual event codes or via Google Tag Manager tags? Implementation with Google Tag Manager ensures the backend doesn’t clutter with the codes and tags are managed easily

While setting up a new goal or conversion in Google Analytics, we can utilize the Events that are tracked on the website and add them as goals. Though, not all events are to be converted into goals.

For example, if you think about your website as a game of basketball. A pass between one player to another is an event and doing a basket is a goal. Getting more baskets in the game is important but that can’t be achieved without understanding the passes (events) between the players.

Goals, on one hand, give you a target to achieve, events on the other give you an understanding of how we achieved the goal with user behavior on the website.

conversions are unique per session and there are times that events make more sense (such as when you want to track how many times per session something is triggered). When you are reviewing the event tracking reporting in Google Analytics, the metric Total Events will give you the raw number of events triggered. For example, if someone clicked an important link 25 times in a session, then that would show up as 25 events triggered. However, you will also see a metric titled Unique Events in your reporting. This will show the unique sessions that triggered events. In my example above, a person clicked a link 25 times (which is 25 events), but that will show up as 1 Unique Event.

conversion goals and events in Google Analytics. Both are important tools to have in your web analytics arsenal. If you are just getting started, my recommendation is that you thoroughly map out an analytics strategy. This will help you determine when conversion goals and events make sense. Without a solid strategy in place, you run the risk of tracking dozens of actions that have relatively little impact on your business.

Thank you for reading, see you next week