Google Analytics event tracking: the basics

Notion of event tracking

When users browse your website, they navigate from page to page, generating page loads. This is the main interaction that is tracked by Google Analytics, and the pages’ URLs are recorded quite simply.

Events are also interactions that website visitors have with your content. But these interactions happen independently from the usual page loads. The scope of interactions that can be tracked by events is very wide (interaction with media (video/sound play), filing of a contact form, activation of a live chat, file download, button click). Some events can even play a determining role (triggering a virtual URL). Events are specific to Google Analytics.

Since summer 2013, Google AdWords offers its users access to the paid & organic report. The report gathers data on both your SEA performances as well as on your SEO results. It allows you to discover possible synergies between these two types of results on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) as it provides you with data for paid and organic results on the same queries. Therefore we decided to conduct a small analysis for one of our clients who is active in the retail industry. You’ll find our methods and conclusions below.

Adobe SiteCatalyst

Before we dig into dashboarding within Adobe SiteCatalyst (previously known as Omniture), a short introduction on Adobe SiteCatalyst: