How to use Google Analytics Event Tracking

Your internet marketing campaign and the structure of your website consists of many aspects that need fine tuning to ensure that you get the best return on your investment. You need to be able to analyse your website with a program like Google Analytics to gain an insight into how well or not visitors interact with your site.

Google Analytics Event tracking enables you to take your investigations that step further by giving you a way to see how people interact with internal components of your site and not just what pages they have viewed.

These actions taken within your pages are great indicators as to where the strengths and weakness within each page lies and will most likely be contributing to the success or failure in getting your visitors to complete the conversions you are expecting.

Google Analytics has a method integrated within it called event tracking that you can use to gain these vital statistics that you can use to create actions that need to be taken to improve your SEO.

As with any marketing strategy, before you move forward with this you need to look at your site in conjunction with the objectives set regarding your website in your business plan and decide what aspects of your site you want to find out more information about.

What is the data you wish to receive results for? What internal components be it Flash web videos or “on click” actions, will give you useful information and knowledge into how a visitor experiences your site? Can you think of certain actions that can be taken from the possible data you will receive? If the answer is yes then this event will be worth tracking.

Now you have decided which events to track you need to take action by adding certain code to the pages of your site.

Each page object, widget or video that you wish to track the interaction with will need to use the

_trackEvent ( ) coding.

Within the brackets of this code, certain aspects need to be added including the category ( name for tracked objects), the action you wish to track, and two additional optional aspects being the label and the value can be used.

Detailed examples of how this coding should be written for different types of actions you wish to track is provided by Google within their page “Setting up event tracking”

One example they provide is:

gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Downloaded', 'Gone With the Wind']);

This code would track how often a video was downloaded from a site.

With videos that are viewed on site you can not only track if visitors clicked  to play them, but also if they were paused or stopped half way through. This information will guide you into how useful your content is and may highlight areas in content that may need updating to make the site more engaging and relevant to what your visitors are looking for.

The tracking of quick contact forms displayed on the homepage that on click of the proceed button will copy and paste the details into the true contact form to complete the conversion, are great to track. You can identify from this what percentage of visitors who use this form carry on to make a full contact page conversion.

It is also an excellent method to see how many near conversion you have from your site and may highlight possible area for improvement within the conversion funnel process.

Websites for showrooms or actual shops where the customer would be more likely to just visit them can track on site actions to Google Maps to see if web visitors have gained enough from the site to make them want to know how to find their location.

Look at your site and see where you can use the google analytics event tracker to assess the quality of your web pages and improve on the goal and conversion rates you currently achieve.