Targeting your marketing & measuring effectiveness through Google Analytics is key to modern marketing. So I thought it would be worth a post looking in more detail at Events in Google Analytics. Wilst I am not planning to write a detailed tutorial on how to set up event tracking (you can find that here), I want to look at the power of tracking events as part of your marketing strategy.
What are events
In google analytics, an event is any action that a visitor may take on your website. For example:
- Filling in and submitting a web form
- Viewing a video
- clicking a link
- downloading a pdf
- Placing something in their cart
The list is endless and as such, tracking events can be a very powerful tool in your marketing kit-bag.
Where do you find them
Event Statistics can be found in Google Analytics under Behaviour -> Events in the Google Analytics menu. This section will be blank until you set up some event tracking tags. This is done using the Google Tag Manager. You will find details on how to set it up here on setting this up here.
How can you use Events
Being able to track when people perform specific actions on your site, you can easily monitor the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Lets look at a couple of Examples: You are running an ad campaign on Google, with the objective of directly generating enquiries through a form on your website. By setting up a google analytics event to capture when someone completes & submit the form, you will be able to track these trough Google Analytics, and see exactly how much each enquiry is costing you. You Have a video on your site, you are thinking of investing in more, but want to know if people are watching it. With video it is possible to capture detailed stats through event tracking, like are people playing the video, and if so, how much of the video are they watching. Monitoring this over time, you will be able to see if the video on your site is of interest to people, and thus is it worth creating more content. You are getting people to your eCommerce site, but not getting orders You can set up an event to trigger at various stages of the buying process for example to see if people are putting things in their cart. That way, you can start to diagnose where the stumbling blocks are.
The World is your Oyster
Hopefully you can start to see that when trying to measure the effectiveness of your marketing, Events are very powerful. If you wanting to dig deeper into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, then I suggest you check them out in more detail. If you can see how events might be useful, but would like some help incorporating them into your marketing, we would be happy to help.
