When event tracking is worth the effort

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Event tracking is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

When it is worth it

Page views alone hide what people actually do. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Track intent, not every click. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

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
• 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 are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.