Event tracking: a practical guide

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. This guide covers what event tracking actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

The reason this keeps coming up

Page views alone hide what people actually do. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to approach it

Name events consistently or the reports are useless. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Track intent, not every click. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Page views alone hide what people actually do
• Name events consistently or the reports are useless
• Track intent, not every click
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Where it usually goes wrong

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

A reasonable first step

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.