Why event tracking matters more than it looks

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Event tracking is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Why this earns attention

Page views alone hide what people actually do. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Name events consistently or the reports are useless. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Where it usually goes wrong

Track intent, not every click. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• Track intent, not every click — 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.