Now that you know what event tracking is and what you should and shouldn’t be tracking, the next step is to start setting up naming conventions for your event tracking. Each event consists of three to four attributes – a category, an action, a label, and sometimes a value. Selecting the right naming conventions is important for both organization and setting up any event-based goals in Google Analytics, so I’ve outlined pointers for each of the three mandatory attributes and a friendly word of caution.
Naming Your Event Category
A category should be a broad attribute, able to cover a number of different interactions. For example, if on your website you’re tracking email clicks, phone calls, and a form submission, a good category might be “Contact.” Another example is if on your website you’re tracking two different sales inquiry forms, a general contact form and a support form, a good category might be “Form.”
You’ll see that in both of these examples, each of these categories was able to be applied to three or more types of interactions. While there isn’t a hard and fast rule for the number of interactions that need to fit under your category, aim for both scalability and accuracy. For example, If you know you’re going to have a number of people watching a video on your website, the best category may be simply “Video”
Naming Your Event Action
The next attribute you’ll need to assign to your event is an action. Many people default to the standard action of “click,” but I want to remind you that there are more actions to complete on your website than just a click. Someone can buy, call, email, download, watch a video, fail to submit a form, succeed in submitting a form, get directions, click a CTA, click an external link, and more! While there’s more wiggle room to be specific here, my main takeaway is to make sure the name you give your action accurately describes the action the user is performing.
Naming Your Event Label
Your label is going to be your most specific attribute. You can specify which video someone watched, which CTA they clicked on, who they emailed, which form they submitted and more. It’s important to get very specific here, because without your specificity, your event tracking may be all for naught.
Depending on the skill of the developer implementing your event tracking (or your own skills with Google Tag Manager), your event label can even contain a user’s response within the checkboxes and radio buttons on your website forms. This can serve especially helpful when you’re looking to retarget users who have filled out a form.
Don’t Collect Personal Identifiable Information (Collecting PII)
I mentioned this briefly in my post about what not to track with event tracking, but it’s important to reiterate that when creating your event category, action, and label, you should make sure you don’t store information from any form fields that could hold any personally identifiable information (PII).
First and foremost, collecting PII is against Google’s terms of service, and as a result Google could wipe out all the data in your Google Analytics account. Secondly (although much less important), there are so many other databases, such as marketing automation programs and CRMs that can hold this information in a much more useful way.
Summary
Naming your event tracking correctly is key to having useful, actionable data. By ensuring you have a broad enough category, an accurate action, and a specific label, all while avoiding PII, you can help set up your business for scalable data collection.