The benefits of event tracking

You've worked so hard to set up your website or app. You've even gone further to start posting 'quality' content, and Google Analytics tells you your page views and app interactions are gradually increasing. But one question remains: What exactly do people do when they visit?

User event tracking provides a more in-depth insight into the habits of visitors to your website and applications. While regular analytics data tells you how many people are coming and how much time they spend, tracking goes a step further to provide context into their actions. 

Common questions teams look to answer with event tracking include:

• Are people not completing the sign-up process? 
• How are users interacting with the site before becoming a lead? 
• Which features of your app are seeing heavy usage?
• Did the newly launched feature get a lot of sign-ups?
• And much more.
  

With event tracking, you can measure essential metrics related to user engagement, ultimately helping you decide the kind of experience or features your users love the most. For example, event tracking on your product can help you measure your activation rate – how quickly and effectively new users are achieving perceived value. Using this data allows you to offer future cohorts a better sign-up process to improve sign-up rates.

Event tracking can show you that interacting with a specific feature is a key action that leads to new users coming back. You can then change your onboarding to highlight that feature to future cohorts of users.

Growth and product teams that implement event tracking can use event data to gain insights into what’s working and where there might be potential for improvement. 

What is event tracking?

An event is a user interaction with a website or application that can be measured and tracked. Thus, event tracking is the process of measuring a particular user's interaction with the elements on your web page or app.

Use cases for event tracking

Event tracking gives product teams access to a wealth of data that basic analytics tools will not provide. The common use cases for event tracking include:

User journey path analysis

Not every user follows the same path to becoming a customer. With a user journey analysis, companies can look for commonalities in user behavior to find out how they’re getting sign-ups and conversions.

User segmentation and cohort building

Segmentation is a powerful tool that allows businesses to group users based on specific activity or demographic information. With segments, a company can build cohorts to accurately view their user base to find what they have in common and how to tailor their product to best meet their needs.

Find key retention drivers

User retention is one of the most important metrics for measuring the health of your product. With event tracking, companies can see which features drive the most retention and adapt their onboarding strategy to reduce user churn.

Measure impact of experiments

Event tracking is a great way to track experiments. Companies can measure how many users interact with the experiment whether it’s focused on testing new features, A/B testing, or measuring a revamped onboarding flow.

Track product launch performance

New product launches are exciting, but companies must know how their products actually perform during a heightened sign-up period. While it’s great to get a lot of sign-ups, it means nothing if users aren’t interacting with your products.

Ecommerce interactions

Ecommerce merchants leverage event tracking to see how users are interacting with their site and how purchases are being made. Common questions ecommerce merchants look to answer with event tracking include:

• Do people skip your products when they visit? 
• How many abandoned carts are there?
• What pages do users typically visit before making a purchase?
• How many users visit our Shipping & Returns policy page?

Form events

Do visitors enjoy completing your contact forms or skip the prompts whenever it pops up? Perhaps there's a problem with the forms that make them start filling but never submit, thus keeping your form submission rate down?

Lead generation

With event tracking, lead generation becomes much easier. By tracking events, growth teams can see which marketing campaigns and of content attract the most users to sign up or purchase their products.

Marketing site conversion rate

Marketers need to know which parts of their website are bringing in conversions. Common questions marketers aim to answer with event tracking include:

• What particular element of your page are people interacting with the most? 
• Which call to action (CTA) buttons are driving the most conversions?
• Is it the image lightbox or the fancy tabbed content?

Fix broken product experiences

What percentage of users stop using your product because a feature doesn’t work as intended? It’s a common question most product teams try to solve, and event tracking makes it easier. By reviewing event data, teams can learn which features are broken and work on fixing them.

What events should be tracked?

It’s tempting to track every single interaction, but that creates more noise than actual useful data. 

Was the action directly done by a user? For example, did they interact with an element or trigger an update? If the event occurs automatically or passively, it should likely not be tracked.

Does this action happen at a reasonable interval? An example of an event that a user may trigger quite often would be a mouseover or hover event on an element. In this case, the event should probably not be tracked as it’ll introduce noise to your data, and it really won’t tell you much.

Could this event tell us something about user behavior? The answer to this question is most often yes, but it’s still a good one to consider. If you’re tracking events like “user pressed the ‘b’ key”, it’s not worth tracking.

How to implement event tracking

There are two methods for implementing user event tracking: manual implementation and autotrack. Here’s how to implement event tracking:

1. Create a tracking plan template

A tracking plan template is used to catalog the events you plan to track. This is done in the form of a spreadsheet and logs all the tracked events along with the description of each event. 

2. Set up event tracking in your website and product

This usually requires dev work. Your team will create the tracking code depending on which platform you use (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, etc.) and set up the events as needed.

3. Send data to warehouses and other tools

As users interact with your website and product, their event info can be sent to other platforms. For example, if a user hasn’t tried a specific feature within X number of days, you can trigger an email from your email service to tell the customer why they should try out the specific feature.

Autotrack events with Freshpaint

Admittedly, setting up event tracking with an abstracted layer like a customer data platform is much easier than doing it manually. However, the product manager or marketer may still struggle with the technicalities or resources required of your typical CDP, especially when it comes to adding code snippets to website pages and manually instrumenting track calls for each event.

Freshpaint is here to make your life easier. Our advanced tracking tool seamlessly collects all relevant event tracking data and sends it to your marketing or analytics tool of choice. And you can set up everything with just a few clicks!

Track data manually or with Autotrack

Freshpaint's Autotrack feature efficiently collects behavioral customer data from your website or mobile application without compromising privacy or security. Whether you need information about Pageviews, Clicks, Form Submissions, Text Field Changes, or any other tracking event, you can rest assured Freshpaint's Autotrack has you covered. 

Importantly, you can finally say goodbye to the days of deploying code for every event or page you're trying to track. With Freshpaint, you can set up event tracking and integrate all your web or app pages in one click. This lifts a heavy burden off your shoulders and affords you and your team more time to focus on building your core product or improving your ROI. 

Label and control events in our UI

Freshpaint has a user-friendly interface that gives you perfect control over the events you wish to track. You can label and control events through the interface without writing a line of code or copying and pasting code snippets on every website page. If you read through our guides for setting up event tracking either with GTM or manually, you'd agree that the Freshpaint advantage isn't something you should pass. 

Send data to all your tools in one click

Website owners who use roughly the same data for numerous analytics tools have to go through the hassle of writing separate instrumentation code to ship the data to each destination. With Freshpaint, all you need to do is integrate once, and you can power all your tools with the same data set. Freshpaint can be integrated with more than 130 marketing, data, and analytics tools, including Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Facebook Pixel, Klaviyo, and more. 

Conclusion

Tracking customer behavior on your website is crucial to making the most out of your online presence. If you were previously guilty of building features in your product or investing in marketing efforts without tracking their performance, it's high time you started monitoring the relevant data and metrics. 

Already thinking about setting up event tracking for your website? Start using Freshpaint for free to implement event tracking and build a modern data infrastructure.