The Importance of Tracking Website Events [Google Tag Manager]

When it comes to your website, aesthetics are definitely important. Let’s face it, looks do matter. Bright, shiny objects draw us in. But, what’s more important when it comes to your website is providing an optimal experience and that means really understanding how your customer engages with your website. By looking at your analytics, you can uncover insights that can help guide the design, technology and strategy behind the site.  

Your website should be a place where people want people to stay and play. You want them to have a pleasurable website experience and hopefully interact with your site along their journey. The only way in which you can track this journey and see what’s working and what’s turning them away is by correctly defining goals and events and connecting with an analytics platform such as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager in addition to tools such as Hotjar, CallRail, Optimizely or Google Experiments.

So, what actions are important to track on a website?

Clicks
Obviously this is triggered when a user clicks a link or CTA on your site. You want to be able to analyze this to see if the content on your site may need refining or the offer behind your CTA is strong enough.

View Event
This is what happens before you get the visitor to click. Does your website user view the appropriate content before they click or do they bounce before they click?

Video Play, Pause, View to End
So, for this you have to have video on your site. By understanding how visitors interact with your video content - how long they watch, when they lose interest - you can retarget them based on views/view completions and you can get ideas around what content is driving the most engagement and produce similar types of content. 

Scroll Tracking
This is very useful and can tell you a lot about the design of your page and the content on your page. In a nutshell, scroll tracking sets breakpoints based on the page height and fires events when visitors scroll through a certain percentages of a page: 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90% and 100%. Scroll tracking is directly related to conversion optimization too. If your CTA is closer to the bottom of your page, but only a small number of visitors are scrolling past 50% of your page, you may want to move your CTA up.

Add To Cart
This is a must for brands selling products or services online. Having such information, you can segment visitors to people who are adding stuff to the cart but not checking out, or people who are viewing products but not adding them to the cart. If you have the Facebook pixel with event code on your checkout pages, you can also retarget these audiences with similar products on Facebook.

Abandoned Cart
This is powerful because understanding why people are not completing purchases and making necessary changes to ensure a lower cart abandonment rate is vital. Is there a bug in the form or are you asking for too much information? Shipping and handling costs too high? You can also use data from cart abandonments to reach out to these potential customers and re-engage with them.

Buy Event
By tracking those who complete the sale, you can look at their user journey to design content/pages and user flows that deliver the best outcome and you collect data about those audiences making it able for you to target similar audiences.

There are many other events that can be tracked like mobile click-to-call, actual call tracking, social icon engagement, outbound link engagement, downloads, email link clicks, etc.

Rhythm is a digital marketing agency with a strong in-house team of web developers and analytics experts that work with brands to understand the site actions that need to be tracked and set up these events using Google Tag Manager. Our team reviews events and site analytics on an ongoing basis to identify opportunities and make refinements that help our clients achieve goals. Ready to achieve your goals, reach out to Rhythm today.

Additional Resources:
Listen Actively and Learn Intelligently with Google Tag Manager