What is Event Tracking?
Event tracking is a technique used to track events in Google Analytics which did not generate a page view. This means events where the visitor interacts with a site within the same page. E.g. downloading a PDF, playing a video, or clicking on a link to another page.
NOTE: If your site uses Google Tag Manager you no longer need to make changes to your page. Find out about managing your events in the Tag Manager or continue reading to find out how to tag up your page without Google Tag Manager. (Note, we strongly recommend upgrading to Google Tag Manager).
Why use Event Tracking in your Analytics Account?
Websites interact with their users in many different ways, for example, Flash, video players, File downloads, external links, dynamically generated pages (cgi, asp,php), etc. The problem is that the basic Google analytics model doesn’t track this kind of interaction, because usually these kinds of events have not generated a new pageview.
Event tracking overcomes this problem by allowing analytics to track events which aren’t pageviews by inserting extra code into those links.
What our tool is and what it does
Our Event Tracking Code Generator is an excel spread sheet you can use to easily create code to track your own events in Google Analytics. You just add the data that is relevant for your specific event and our tool generates the code you need to paste into your web page. You will not need to make any changes within Google Analytics.
How to use it
Note that our downloadable spread sheet has two tables. The only difference between them is one extra column – which you use if you want to use an extra parameter to identify your event.
The spreadsheet is very easy to use, simply;
1. Fill in the columns of the table, (examples are provided to help you).
2. Once all columns are completed, you can copy the Code which has been created in the last column, and paste it into your web page.
What to do with the code when it has been generated
Once the code is generated it is ready to paste in to your web page within the code for your link.
For example here you can see the code inserted in red
We recommend using our spreadsheet to keep a record of every event you tag on your site, so that future users will understand where and why event tracking was used.
