In this video, I want to talk about event tracking in Google Analytics. And like with goals, event tracking has a lot of details. And I'm really only going to scratch the surface of event tracking here. And so if you end up using a lot of events on your website, there's definitely more to explore. There's definitely more to look at here and understand. So events in Google Analytics are a type of way that we can track people interacting.

So we can set up custom code to help us track different things that people do on our website, different things people click on or scroll to or engagement. And there's a lot of different ideas of the things that you can track as events. You can track navigation clicks and how people are using search features and how many people are clicking on different kinds of links, that early delete website how many people click on affiliate links. You can also track how many people watch a video or how many people engage with pop ups or dialog boxes, or how many people download key resources or engage with your website by sharing information or on mobile devices, how many people click to call or you can track dwell time and hover rates, you can track how many people use rating systems that you might have in place, thumbs up thumbs down systems.

So the list is endless with what you can track with event tracking. So what we want to think about is, what are those key interactions? What are those key things that people are doing on your website that are somewhat important to understand, and important to help you know how people are really engaging with the different features and functionality your website has to offer? Talk about how you set up event. There's four parts to an event. There's event categories, and then actions, event labels, and event values.

So the category tells you the overall description of the event. So in their example, and it's a good example, there might be a category of video, right? So that captures all the different videos on your website. And then within a video you have different kinds of actions. So a video might have an action playing, it might have an action of pausing, might have an action of playing it all the way to the end, maybe an action or playing it 30 seconds, you then have the event label. And this is where it helps you start to differentiate the different videos you have on your website, right, you don't have one video, you might have 14 different videos on your website.

So in this case, the name of this example video they have on Google Analytics resources is fall campaign. But you might have another video on your website called spring campaign or summer campaign. And so you could differentiate the different videos and differentiate it within your tracking in your reporting by using different labels. If you have any kind of numeric information about your event, you can pass that in as event value. So for the video that might represent how many minutes or how many seconds of the video people played. But let's walk through an example.

Let's say we have this button on our website, and we want to know how many people click on it. Okay, so What we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit of custom code to this. So we've got this custom script that we're going to write, where we say ga send event. CTA, click watch video, let's go through the parts of that. So the Send event is just instructions to Google Analytics that we're sending an event to them. The CTA is our category.

Click is our action. And then our label is watch video. Right? So now we're saying, Okay, we've got a call to action, CTA that somebody clicked on. And the text in that particular call to action said watch video. Great.

So now we know how many people click on that button. Let's talk about how you report on these events. So to get to the event reports in Google Analytics, click on behavior, click on events, and then click on top events. This will show you all the events that you are tracking on your website. So in this case, let's take a look at videos so click on videos, and then we can see all the different actions with In the video, in this case, play pause, and then 1025 50% all the different percentages, those what percentage of the video people watched. And then we also have an event down here of watched end.

In this case, let's take a look at the action of play, how many people played a video, we then go to that and then we can see within the label all the different YouTube videos that people played on this particular website link and see the total events tells us the total amount of time that people play those. And then the unique events, which is the unique number of sessions in which that video was played so we can get an idea of how many people are rewatching those different videos and playing the video multiple times. There are lots of different plugins and resources that you can use. riveted helps you measure Active Time on your site. Scroll down helps you measure how many people are scrolling through your website. You also have dynamic click tracking where you can really measure precisely how people are reading and scrolling and clicking through your website.

That YouTube video tracking that example. I should code that's available at this particular link. And you can use that to measure the different video watching activity. There's also a bunch of user experience ones, some of which I've written up about. So you can get that example code on my website. And then there's also different ways that you can measure form interactions with event tracking.

And those are just some of the ideas if you start looking around for different event, ideas and different tracking code for those, you can find lots of different examples. You can find lots of different code bases available out on the web and on different forums and different resource guides about Google Analytics. With events. It's very similar to goals you want to step through and think about all the different actions people can take on your website. But whereas with goals, we were thinking about the bigger things that people can do with your business and the different bigger ways that the website could really help your business. Well, with events you can think about the smaller ways that people can interact with your website so you can think about the different ways that people think Like scrolling, like the time spent, like clicking on individual links like watching videos, those may not be critical for your business might tell you more minor things about how people are using your website as opposed to really big things about how your website is driving revenue.

But nevertheless, they're important to measure they're important to pay attention to and then of those, you can start setting up the event tracking code, and then really start paying attention to those events in your reports. Next up, let's wrap up this course with a recap of the different things we've talked about, and some next steps that you should take right now.