Thrudigital

One of the more exciting developments I have seen lately is the introduction of a feature called event tracking to Google Analytics.

What it allows you to do is register the occurrence of ‘events’ within your pages using JavaScript. Google Analytics then spits out the statistics on your events within the Event Tracking section of your dashboard.

You can also tag events with categories that allow for a breakdown within these statistics.

The JavaScript function that you use to register an event is as follows, straight from the Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide:

_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

So you have three levels of categorisation through this function: category, action and optional_label. And, you can also record a optional_value.

I did some basic experimentation with integrating this into the Apprentice game that we have developed at thrudigital. I have implemented event tracking on five different categories of actions:

• Clicked to vote
• Clicked on a sharing link
• Clicked on a Twitter profile pic
• Submitted the contact thrudigital form
• Clicked on the link to the thrudigital website

This gives us a nice little breakdown of what people are clicking on once they get to our one-page mini-site. We could have even gone one step further and tagged each of the vote events with the name of the contestant voted for – that might be a job for tomorrow…

Theoretically, you could trigger an event for almost any sort of event within the user interface of your web site. You could even do tricky stuff like record how far users get through a form before bailing out. Or even how long users are taking to get through a form on average, using the optional_value field.

If you know of anyone using this new functionality in a creative way, please leave a comment here and let us know.