In This Lesson You Will Learn The Basics Of Events & Conversions
The purpose of implementing Events and Conversions in your Google Analytics account is to understand the minor and major goals from your website. What you want the website user to do on your website? Understanding if they are achieving this or not.
Importance of Events and Conversions in Google Analytics
- What Is An Event In Google Analytics?
- 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.
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What Is A Goal Or Conversion In Google Analytics?
- Goals are the target objectives on your website. It is what you want the users to do when they come to the website.
- It could be a Contact Form Submission, a phone number click Or a transaction if you have an ECommerce website.
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What are the best practices for Event tracking?
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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.
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“All goals are events but not all events are goals”
While setting up a new goal or conversion in Google Analytics, we can utilise 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 behaviour on the website.
If you are having an issue, we can help. Please get in touch.
Implementing events via Google Tag Manager is always better as it doesn’t clutter the website backend with different event codes. Separate codes can lead to issues with website layout and loading speed.
With Google Tag Manager, the script is only run once and it is easier to implement without the need of a web developer for minor changes.
Most often accounts will have an events layout that is confusing, configuring events to stop data loss is critical.
We typically come across websites where event tracking has been constantly worked on over the last couple of years or by someone who has recently left the business. It is hard to understand or derive any useful insight from the data without understanding what was implemented and why.
We specialise in account reviews where we understand what is implemented and what is required for your reporting. A fresh strategy with correct events and naming protocols can be implemented without the need to change any of the current setups.