- [Instructor] The next set of reports
in the behaviors section are events
which need a little bit of explanation.
We all understand what it is to load or view a page.
What about the things that happen inside of a page?
Or the other types of digital content and interactions
that don't fit neatly into that page view paradigm.
Well, that's why we have this more generic way
of tracking what we're just gonna call events.
An event is any site behavior or interaction
that you may want to track.
These could include file downloads, video plays,
social buttons, mobile ad clicks,
or any other embedded feature or way for your user
to interact with your site.
Now, if you already have event tracking set up on your site,
we're gonna show you how to use, interpret,
and analyze those reports.
If you need to add events to your site from scratch,
well, that's gonna require some recoding of the HTML
and JavaScript on your site
and such is just a bit outside the scope of this course.
So these next couple videos may not apply,
but I think it's still a good idea to understand them
and suggest you look into the Advanced Analytics course
that deals with those topics.
And we'll talk about a few more resources as well
at the end of this video.
Okay, a little bit more about the event model.
An event is at the hit-level.
That means it usually happens within one page of your site.
There are four different attributes here,
category, action, label, and value.
We can set these up however works for you.
It's completely open, but there are some common ways
and I'll walk you through an example.
Let's say, for example, we have a Facebook button here
at the footer of our homepage
and we'd like to track the number of clicks on this button.
Now, the category is typically the object
that was interacted with.
So, in this case, the category could be Navigation,
or Footer; that's where your Facebook is located.
When we think about analysis,
that would help us identify that.
The action usually describes the type
of interaction with the object.
Here, if you have several social accounts
that are linked in your footer,
the action could be attributed
to the more generic social button.
The label helps categorize events
and provides more specific information.
Here, the event would likely be labeled Facebook.
This could help differentiate
from the other social buttons you have on your footer.
And lastly, the value is a numeric value associated
with the event.
This isn't likely to be used in this case,
it's totally optional,
but I suppose it could be used as a count
of how many times a user clicked
on the Facebook button, for example.
Now, to track events through Google Analytics,
you're gonna have to add JavaScript to your site
that's gonna send Google the details
of each event that's triggered by your users.
If you plan on implementing a large number events track
on your site, you should definitely consider
using Google Tag Manager to track these events
and other hits more easily.
If you're interested in learning more
about how exactly to implement this,
I suggest you check out this Google developers guide.
It's gonna tell you how to get started tracking with events
and since this is a little more difficult than, say,
just creating a goal within Analytics,
you might need some help from your backend developers
and some JavaScript experts as well.
And when you think about all the ways
that your users can interact with your site content,
tracking events can really help you get to the bottom
of that user engagement, all the way down to the hit-level
and past the page, and even inside the page.