Before you invest in event tracking

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on event tracking, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Page views alone hide what people actually do
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Name events consistently or the reports are useless. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Track intent, not every click. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Three things worth confirming about event tracking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Name events consistently or the reports are useless — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.