This is a free lesson which originally appeared in our Google Analytics Fundamentals Course.

Overview

The Behavior Events reports provide a behavioral view related to specific Google Analytics Events which you are tracking. Events are specific actions which you want to track such as adding a product to a shopping cart, watching a video, etc.

  • Overview: High-level view of main Event metrics.
  • Top Events: Event category, action and label reports.
  • Pages: View of the pages which most commonly trigger events.

Events configuration is completely custom for each website. You website developer likely configured them (or needs to). Here are the basics.

The Anatomy of an Event

A few different elements of an event are assigned and affect your Google Analytics reporting. Here’s an overview.

  • Event Category: General category of the event, other events may share the same category. Examples: Videos, Products, Brochures.
  • Event Action: The specific user action taken. Examples: Viewed, Added to Cart, Downloaded
  • Event Label: A label which helps identify to which item the Action happened. Examples: Video 123, Product XYZ, Breakfast Menu.

So for an Ecommerce website, a sample event to track adding products to cart would have a category of “Products”, action of “Added to Cart” and Label of “Product XYZ (name of product)”.

Events Vs Goals

To the marketer, events and goals may not seem very different. They are different from a technical standpoint which isn’t the focus of this course.

  • Goals: A Goal is a conversion that you want to track and have a specific value assigned to. For example, new website registrations and phone calls are common goals. Businesses can assign the value of a phone call or new member.
  • Events: Events are less formal. On an Ecommerce website, we may want to track an event each time an item is added to the shopping cart. Or on a restaurant website, we may want to track an event each time a menu is downloaded.