Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager: Tips and Tricks
Google Analytics makes it easy to see how many people visit your website. Sign up for GA, add some code to your website theme, and voila! You're rolling in data.
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But, of course, you'll soon learn that this is only a small piece of the puzzle.
Google Analytics is great, but with ONLY the base GA code in place, you'll have a hard time discovering what these people actually do on your website.
What's missing from vanilla Google Analytics?
That base GA code doesn't show you how far your visitors scrolled through your pages, if they watched your videos, or if they clicked any of your calls to action (CTAs).
Want to know if the people who visit your site download your PDFs or white papers? Or how they interact with your opt-in forms? You'll need extra tracking code to pull it all off.
You probably already know that the solution to finding these answers in Google Analytics comes from adding event tracking code to your site. But did you know that thanks to Google Tag Manager, you don’t have to be a JavaScript wiz to setup event tracking?
Just about anyone can add event tracking to an existing site in under 20 minutes using tag templates in Google Tag Manager (GTM), assuming you already have GTM on your site.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to use GTM to set up my four favorite Google Analytics event tracking tags. Not only that, but I’ll share why these tags are critical to optimizing your website and I’ll show you a couple of shortcuts that will save you loads of time while applying these tracking upgrades to your site.
What is event tracking?
Event tracking is how you tell Google Analytics to record the actions people take within the pages of your website. Event tracking goes beyond the capabilities of your standard GA tracking code and requires additional code to pull off.
These user-triggered actions are unique to each website, so Google isn't able to track them automatically on your behalf with the base GA code. You need to tell them the actions you want to track, and this is done through an additional event tracking code library.
The events we’re going to discuss in this post include tracking downloads, link clicks, video views, and page scrolling.
Is Google Tag Manager required to track events?
No, you do not have to use GTM to track events. You can manually add the event tracking code (which can easily top 100+ unique events and manual code placements) to your website and collect the same event data if you have a solid process in place and strong attention to detail.
The process of manually adding event tracking code to a website typically takes days, if not weeks, and can cost $1,000's in web developer time and fees. It also takes a lot of time to debug, test and maintain the code as your tracking needs evolve.
You can probably guess as to how I feel about manually adding event tracking code to your site. Yes, you can torture yourself and add event tracking tags to your website manually if you like. But as an alternative, I highly recommend you add your event tracking the easy way… using GTM.
Why should I add event tracking to my website?
Not every website needs event tracking. If you just want to see how much traffic your site gets, and where your traffic comes from, then the standard Google Analytics tracking code will take care of all your needs.
But collecting on-page visitor behavior data is the next step of analysis for a website owner who wants to excel in marketing and business growth.
Here are some marketing disciplines that can use our recommended event data to significantly improve their results.
PPC advertising
If you run any type of paid advertising, event tracking can help you understand how people interact with your landing pages. You can use event tracking to see how far people read down your pages and where they fall off. You can also track if they watch your videos, and how they interact with your forms, and which links they click.
Blogging and content marketing
When you publish a blog post, do you know if anyone actually reads it?
You can find the answer easily if you track page scrolling and measure reader engagement with events. As you probably know, better reader engagement can lead to higher search engine rankings, as well as more conversions.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Every CRO project starts with a deep dive into your current analytics. If you have set up GA to track on-page behavior with events, you'll be able to discover what is needed to increase your conversion rates.
E-commerce
Have a sales campaign that isn't working? Data from event tracking can help you optimize your product pages, and increase your sales.
Lead generation
You can track lead form interactions and opt-ins using event tracking.
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