A practical checklist for event tracking

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Run through this the next time event tracking comes up.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The checklist

• 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
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

Page views alone hide what people actually do. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What this looks like day to day

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.