What Is Event Tracking, and Why Should I Care?

Good websites are not just static “online brochures”—they’re meant to be interactive. You want your website visitors to scroll through the page, click on links, download helpful content, play videos, fill out your form, etc. In the world of website analytics, each of these actions is called an “event”. Event tracking is how you can understand behavior on your website.

Why is event tracking important on my website?

Ultimately, your website is all about motivating visitors to take a particular action. Perhaps your overriding goal is to get them to pick up the phone and call you. Maybe you want them to schedule a free consultation, download an ebook or place an order. Whatever your objective, each page of your website should be optimized to increase the chances that this action will take place. It should be “optimized for conversion”.

You probably have a very good handle on how many visitors are taking this desired action. But do you know what’s happening from the time someone lands on your site until the time he or she either takes that desired action or leaves? If not, you may be missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Event tracking provides a course of action

Event tracking is important because the data it provides helps you optimize your website for conversion. This, in turn, means more of whatever action you’re trying to generate. More calls, more leads, more orders, more of what you want.

Say, for example, that your goal is to get people to fill out a “Request a Quote” form, and website visitors can get to this form from five different web pages. It’s not enough to just know that X% of visitors arrive at this form. You want to know which links, buttons and pages are doing the best job of getting people to this form. This way you can use these successful options as models for the ones that aren’t working as well.

Likewise, you may have four “Buy Now” buttons on one page. What if event tracking shows you that it’s the button at the very bottom of the page that’s getting the most clicks? This can mean that the rest of the page is not doing a good job of selling, since it’s taking a lot of convincing to get people to want to buy. You may need to rethink the page or sales pitch.

You can’t evaluate things you’re not measuring

The bottom line is, without data you’re making decisions based on guesses. And guesses are not likely to get you the optimized results you want.