Identifying and Tracking Key Website Events with Google Analytics

So, how do you create events or key events or identify key events? Well, you want to first define or identify what events on a website to track. And this can be done with Google Analytics 4, just understanding on your website what's important. If you have a brochure that people can download, well, you might want to track that.

See how many people are downloading the brochure, and if the people who are downloading the brochure are leading to purchases, you know, things like that. So you identify all the events that are important on your website, obviously purchases and things like that, but it might be viewing a product page, you know, so you identify the events that are important. And then once you have that understanding, you go to the admin, click on events, and then you see which events are the default events that are already provided for you by Google.

And you could toggle, I'll show you on the actual platform, sometimes a toggle switch, they may switch that up a little bit, but it could be a toggle, or it could be a star, as you'll see, to mark that as a key event. If a suitable event does not exist, then you want to create a custom event or modify an existing event, one of the default events, and make it more specific to your needs. But then once it's created, if you're doing a custom event, then you just switch it to a key event.

So let me show you what I'm talking about. Sure, I have the right website. So if you go to admin, and you go to data display, one of the menus, and you're going to click on events, right, right there.

Now you see a list of events. And these are all key events. In this case, I mentioned in the slides, the toggle switch, but they switched it, in this case, to a star.

If I want to unmark that star, I would say, yes, can't unmark it. I'm keeping that, but you can see purchase, since this is a website of an energy brand, and people don't purchase anything, they enroll, that's not one of the ones that we are looking at, right? So you would just simply look to see, some of these are custom events, some of these are default events.

On your Google Analytics platform, it will show you the default events that exist. You just indicate which of them you are going to mark as a key event. And then once you have it as a key event, you can always unmark it.

Okay, so now let's discuss creating a custom event. Let's say there's something that is not currently being tracked as a default event, and you want to have that as an event, and then make it a key event. So here's an example.

Let's say you want to track when users click a download brochure button on the homepage. So that's very specific to a particular brochure that the users can download on your homepage. So you would name the event, brochure, again, using that nomenclature, brochure underscore download is the name of the event, underscore click.

So you want to say, you're saying, you know, the event is when a brochure is down, someone clicks on download brochure. And then you say the event name equals click, you know, so this is a click that you're tracking. It could be a sign-up, it could be a purchase, but in this case, a click.

And then you're saying the conditions are that when someone clicks, and they click on a link, the link text that they're clicking on equals download brochure. So, on that button that they're clicking on, it says download brochure. And that's how Google Analytics knows, oh, it's the download brochure button that we're looking for, not the enroll now button, not the contact us button, but the download brochure button, right? And this particular download brochure button that we want is the one that's on the whole homepage.

So you're also including the page underscore location that contains the homepage. You might have had it track it on a different page. If you wanted to do that, then you would say page location contains product X or whatever it is.

So essentially, to track a brochure download, you give the event a name, and you create the matching conditions. In this case, the name must equal click. We're looking for clicks.

And we're looking for clicks on the download brochure buttons. The link text must equal download brochure. And then the page location contains the homepage, right? So let's look at what that looks like on the actual site, create event.

So you create custom events, you give them a name, right? You would put the brochure download link there. And there is an option to create it with code. We're not going to get into that in a significant way, you know, in this course, but we're just talking about, and you can also determine when you can mark it as a key event.

You can do that here or do that when you get to the actual page. I'll show you, and you can, you know, just make star it, but in that case, so it would tell you, you know, the various event names. If you want to use an existing event and modify it or use it as a trigger in some way, you would do that there, or you would go to create more, view more options. We're not taking an existing event and modifying it, but you're creating a whole new event.

And that's what you'd put in the brochure download click, right? And then you'd give it the name, as we mentioned. So the name equals click event name equals, in this case, you would want to say click, right? And you can say equals does not equal, equal ignore case. So you do have other options there, but we're just keeping it simple equals click parameter.

So you would add your parameter here, contains, we'll say, equals, and then you put the value in, and now we're saying it's going to have to say download brochure. And then you would add an additional condition. In this case, we'll add the page location.

See, it's already there, right there, page location contains. Now, why do we want to say contains here? Because it's not going to equal exactly backslash homepage, right? It will contain the backslash homepage. You'll have other stuff there, too.

So, only if we're going to have the entire URL here, we would use equal in this case, and then we'll just save the event, right? And that is your custom event. We're not going to do that. Right to the slide.

Okay. So we'll close this section with an activity. In this activity, you would define key events in your website that you want to track that you need to know to improve your marketing campaigns, and explain the rationale, right? So I want to track the download of this brochure because this brochure is critical to our lead nurturing process.

You need to read this brochure to really get an understanding. So we want to emphasize that as something that needs to happen. I want to add to the cart, right? That's going to be a key event because that's something we might want to target in the future, people or create an audience of the people who have added to the cart, and we want to track to see how many items added to the cart get sold.

So you go through the various aspects of your sales process, your sales funnel, your sales journey, and figure out which of them are important considerations to track on Google Analytics.