Event tracking: the questions we get asked most

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. The questions about event tracking that come up most often on our calls.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Do we need to care about this?

Page views alone hide what people actually do. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How do we know it is working?

Track intent, not every click. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. 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.