Date: January 17, 2010 at 6:09 pm

Event Tracking is one of the most powerful tracking possibilities in Google Analytics to track the virality of what you produce on your website, blog or web project. With even tracking you can simulate page views in flash files so that you can see the interactivity between your user and your flash file. With Event Tracking you can track clicks on buttons, how long it takes to load a certain element, or as in this example how many people shares your material on social platforms/subscribe to your RSS.

The implementation requires that you have an account on Google Analytics and that you have implemented the ga.js script instead of the legacy urchin.js script in the bottom of your pages.

1. Adding the tracking code

To each of the events you would like to track you should add the following code. (For flash you need to do it a bit differently, but I’ll cover that if you want in later stories.)

onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘category’, ‘action’, ‘optional label’);”

in a link

<a href=”http://jesperastrom.com” onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘category’, ‘action’, ‘optional label’);”>Anchor Text</a>

You can choose any type of category, action or optional label that you want. You don’t have to choose a label really, but I find it useful. In this example I set category to what type of button they are clicking. I set action to the type of sharing the button represents and I set the optional label as a dynamic label for the page name.

As I am running a wordpress blogg the following code is the result:

onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Subscribe’, ‘RSS’, ‘<?php the_title(); ?>’);”

But you can easily exchange, remove etc. the last part of that code to represent some other label you want to put on that specific action. You can also add a fourth element to your set of data points which is an integer rather than a string. This integer represents the value for load time it takes to perform the requested action. Your code for such an implementation, possibly best used with play, pause, stop buttons for video, is as follows:

onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Subscribe’, ‘RSS’, ‘<?php the_title(); ?>’, downloadTime );”

If you choose to set up a tracker for downloads, movie plays, success events such as register buttons or clicks to check out pages (to compare to actual check outs if you have some unexplained drop off), then this works as well. Just change the category and action name to logical labels so that you can find the data in an easy way when you look in your reports.

2. Finding your events

There is an easy way to find the data for the events. Just wait about 24 hrs and a new tab will appear under your Content tab in the left navigation of your Google Analytics account.

Click the Event tracking tab and it will fold out so that you can see the options within it.

Click around and you’ll find the different things sorted under each category.

3. Setting up a Custom Report

In my other post about Custom Reports in Google Analytics I showed you where to find the custom reports and how to create them. To simplify the drilldown of collected data I like to set one up for this occation. To see how I do that I recommend you to watch the video tutorial below that is also available on my YouTube account.

Possibly related posts: