Event tracking: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about event tracking this quarter, make it the first item below.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Start here

Page views alone hide what people actually do. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Then this

Name events consistently or the reports are useless. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Eventually

Track intent, not every click. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What this looks like day to day

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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.