Who Can Benefit from Tracking Events?

In the world of website analytics, tracking events is the key to understanding behavior on your website. What actions are people taking (such as scrolling, clicking, downloading or filling out)? Which specific page elements are motivating them to take that action? Which potential actions are being ignored? The answers to questions like these can be the “secret sauce” for improving your website conversion overall.

Should you be tracking events?

If your goal is to make money from your website—either directly through online sales or indirectly through lead generation—then yes, you should be doing event tracking. Why? Because not tracking events is like leaving sales on the table in a statistically knowable way.

Event tracking gives you insight into what your website visitors are looking for, and this insight can be used to optimize your site for conversion. And the more optimized your site is, the easier it is to get the “sale” (even if what you’re “selling” is a free download of your white paper).

Event tracking can answer a wide range of questions

Because of this, event tracking is especially beneficial for:

• E-commerce websites – How many people made it to your site? Of those, who looked at the product, who put items in their shopping cart, and who actually bought something? What exactly did they click to get from one point to the next? Where are the drop-off points? Are people getting to the checkout page and then clicking over to the help page (an indication that there’s something confusing about your checkout page)? Are some of your blogs driving sales while others are just “taking up space”?
• Lead generation websites – How well are your lead generation forms doing? What’s enticing people to ask for the form? Once they get to the form, how many start filling it out but then abandon it before hitting the “submit” button?
• Affiliate marketers – Which products are getting the most traffic? What can you do to make your other affiliate links mimic the successful ones?
• Publishers of for-profit online content – Are people signing up for your course but then failing to download the course material? If you’re running other company’s ads on your site, do ads that are in a particular style convert better than others? Are the third party ad networks that you work with providing accurate numbers, or are they cheating you?

Event tracking can answer all of these questions, and many more. If you want to make money from your website, event tracking is for you.