Three myths about event tracking

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few things about event tracking that get repeated more often than they get checked.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

“It only matters for big sites”

Page views alone hide what people actually do. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

“Our platform handles it”

Track intent, not every click. 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.

The short version

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
• Page views alone hide what people actually do — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.