What are Events?

Events on Google are interactions such as when a user clicks on your website, downloads one of your PDF documents, or clicks on a specific link and submits a form. ALL of these actions can be classified as events on Google Analytics.

Accessing the report of the event on Google Analytics is a fairly simple procedure. All you have to do is follow these steps:

• Sign in to Google Analytics.
• Navigate to your view.
• Open Reports.
• Select Behavior > Events

Components of Events

To fully understand the report, you have to look deeper into the anatomy of events. What are the components that comprise an event? 

According to Google, an event has the following components:

• Category
• Action
• Label (optional, but recommended)
• Value (optional)

Accompanied by each component, there is an “event hit”, which is the value given to each event in the report of the concurrent event. For example:

• Category: "Videos"
• Action: "Play"
• Label: "Baby's First Birthday"
  
  

Let’s look at what each component signifies:

Category

A category is a name you give to the group you want to analyze as events. For instance, in the example above, the name of the group being analyzed is videos. This means that the interaction of your users with videos will be looked into by the events algorithm.

Action

Action is the parameter that enables you to name the type of interaction you want to analyze. For Video, it can play button clicks or stop button clicks. Google says the two most important things to keep in mind about actions are:

• All actions are listed independently from their parent categories.
• A unique event is determined by a unique action name.
  
  

Label

Labels are used to add extra data to events which can streamline the analysis of each interaction. Sticking to the videos example, this can be things like video titles or the name of downloaded files.

Event Implementation 

The events model can be very accommodating. To make the most out of them you need to keep a few things in mind:

First, you must figure out all the elements you want to be analyzed as events. This way, you can prioritize the most important elements.

Use a report user plan to organize your event measurement reports. You can find out more about this using the platform.

As we can tell from the anatomy of each element within the event section, the name you give each element has a huge impact on the clarity of your report. It is extremely important to give your categories relevant, specific names.

The Bottom Line

The events section on Google Analytics can be a great tool for managing and monitoring your digital marketing strategy.