What makes more sense (or is proper according to google)? Registering an event or a virtual pageview with Google Analytics when tracking navigation through a webpage with heavy use of ajax?
I had been using events to track this kind of thing, but I find myself kind of emulating the pageview mechanism by tracking the clicks through events like the following:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'signup', 'clicked', 'header']);
should I instead be creating virtual pageviews when visitors click on links that call AJAX and bring up dynamic content?
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/signup/form']);
If this is a new content that user navigates to, then you should be using virtual pageviews.
If you use events for all navigation then some metrics will be unreliable like pages/visit, avgTimeOnPage, avgTimeOnSite, pageDepth. If you use pageviews for navigation these metrics will be closer to the truth.
Since not so long ago, you couldn't set up goals for events, which made virtual pageviews the way to go. These days, you can set up event goals, so the question is certainly valid.
What you can do with virtual pageviews (and not with events) is to visualize a funnel. If you want to follow the path of your visitors, I'd recommend a virtual pageview.
If you're using events, you can only find out that some time during the visit, the visitor opened the form. With virtual pageviews you can see in what preceeded the form, what lead the visitor to it.
I would go with the event tracking for more information about the event. Showing an in-page form that doesn't change the content is more of an event, but it's not really down to that, but rather how you need to report it.
Using pageviews for dynamic events within page would inflate the actual pageview numbers and since you can use events as goals in the new UI, there is no reason to track them as pageviews anymore.
Related
I'm trying to wrap my head around GTM Tags and how they work in GA4.
For example I have this GTM tag that fires when a button is clicked. This is working and I can see the event fire in the GA4 debug view.
If I did nothing else would I be able to see the event count of map_grid_view without registering a custom dimension? (I know the event parameters would not show)
If i registered click_text and page_path as custom dimensions then re-used those event parameters in other events I created would that data pull automatically into GA4 once i published my GTM container? (Is this approach considered best practice?)
Yes. You don't need to register the event name
Yes. It's a best practice if you can re-use them. Since free version of GA4 only allow us to register 50 custom dimensions and metrics. If the tracking strategy go complicated in the future. The quota is not enough then.
I want to see what page on the site my users were on when they fired the first event action: add to cart, effectively starting their shopping journey within that session. I'm in Google Analytics, but completely stumped how to combine the pageviews and event action to pinpoint that this was the page the user was on the first time the user fired that event in their session (assuming Unique Event could be a metric used?).
Would love some ideas and help! Thank you!!
From the Events report you can't deduce when a user clicked for the first time on an element. The data is aggregated.
You could do it for example by sending a custom dimension at the time of the click on your element and assigning a cookie that checks if that information has already been sent to Analytics. If the cookie exists, don't send that dimension anymore.
It is not a 100% reliable method but it allows you to get the information you want for the future.
I want to know the time a user spends to fill a particular field in the page and want to trigger an event if the user spends more than 5 minutes to answer a question on that page.
I've looking at various Web Analytical tools like Crazyegg, Lucky Orange. Google Analytics for my website and i did not find any of them have this feature.
Is there any way that i can get this feature in my website.
I've been researching to get the perfect fit but in vain.
Any advice would help.
Thank you.
With the help of the Google Tag Manager you should be able to do this with Google Analytics:
Add a Datalayer to your page, which fires if a User starts filling your form/field.
Build a Event, Listening on this Datalayer and send a Timestep (for example: Category = Form, Action = Start, Label = {{Timestamp}}) Now you know then a User started interacting with your form.
Build a second Datalayer, fireing when the User sends your form. Build a Event for this and send your second Timestamp to GA (for example: Category = Form, Action = End, Label = {{Timestamp}}) - now you know how long a user needs for your form.
Trigger the Event
Here we can use the same Datalayer, we used with the Event-Tracking.
Build a Triger for your Event, listening on the Datalayer and then starts a Countdown (Timer-Trigger in GTM)
In the Timer-Trigger rules you have to specify, that the Trigger should not fire if the second Datalayer (Datalayer-End) fired allready.
We use Square to book appointments in our showroom. In an effort to optimize this booking page, I want to create a funnel and track clicks. According to their documentation it looks like the only way do this is via embed and I do not see anything about appointments in their api documentation.
I really just want to track user clicks within the booking process and create some sort of conversion success page after the booking is complete. Any ideas?
There is not a way to do what you're looking for using the Square API. If you have access to the machine, I'm sure there's some way you could track clicks on the booking page (e.g. using a browser extension), but you wouldn't be able to make any changes to the Square UI.
Incidentally, Square is constantly making improvements to various aspects of the UI so that they will be more effective for all merchants. I do not personally know much about Appointments, but I expect that people are working to optimize it for you :).
I'm in the process of upgrading a couple of sites to Universal Analytics and need some help setting up goals for conversion tracking...
I am now using auto event tracking (click listener) to see where users are clicking on the sites' forms, but I'm not sure how I can create goals for form submissions as the URL does not change. (Previously I was sending virtual pageviews when the submit button was clicked, but I don't think it's possible to do this in Universal Analytics?)
I know by using the click listener I can still see how many times the submit button of the form is clicked, but I need to set this up as a goal so I can monitor the cost per conversion of my AdWords campaigns.
Any help appreciated!
loop, if you are using GTM, you can simply use Form Submit Listener:
This listener then could fire an event tracking, which will serve as the condition for any conversion goals you might need. Just keep in mind when setting the conditions for goals, ALL of the Event-related dimensions (category, action, label) need to match, even though you can use only one (for example category = form submitted) as well.