You’ve just learned all about event tracking and the fact that you can track more on your website than you ever thought possible. Now it’s time learn how to implement event tracking and the effect it can have on your Google Analytics metrics.
How To Implement Event Tracking
Google Analytics event tracking can be added to your website one of two ways. With both ways you’ll still first need to determine your category, action, label, value (if applicable) and what exactly is being tracked.
The first way to implement event tracking is to have a developer write the event tracking in your website code and have the event sent directly to Google Analytics. Here, most of the heavy lifting lies on the developer. However, if you have Google Tag Manager installed on your website, you may want to opt for the second way.
With Google Tag Manager you can implement Google Analytics event tracking yourself, without involving a developer. Once you log into Google Tag Manager, select the Google Analytics event tag and fill in your category, action and label. Next, set up your trigger – when the event tracking will fire (occur). This trigger may range from an anchor tag ID clicked on one of your CTAs to a click url for your PDFs to the visibility of “thank you” text for form submissions.
The Effects of Event Tracking on Google Analytics
After you implement event tracking, it’s likely that you’ll start to look into your Google Analytics. The first thing you may notice is a drop in your bounce rate. That’s because by default, event tracking is not a non-interaction hit. To better clarify, let me dive into hits, non-interaction hits, and bounces for a minute.
Every time you have an interaction on your website that results in data being sent to Google Analytics, it’s called a hit. As mentioned in the beginning of this post, Google doesn’t track most of your interactions by default, limiting the number of hits Google Analytics receives. Whenever you implement event tracking, you begin tracking interactions that weren’t tracked before, which sends more data (hits) to Google Analytics. By default these hits are not non-interaction hits.
A bounce on your website is defined as an instance when only one interaction was had on your website before a user leaves. Now that you’re recording more second interactions on your website, you’ve got less bounces, which lowers your bounce rate. If you’re ever interested in event tracking without lowering the bounce rate, have your developer label these events as “non-interaction” hits or do it yourself in Google Tag Manager.
Summary
Knowing how to implement Google Analytics event tracking and its effect on your data will make a world of difference when making data driven decisions. You may be tempted at this point to track everything under the sun. But before you do, read about what not to track with event tracking so you can be sure you’re only tracking metrics that matter.