7 Days of Urchin 7: Day 5 – Event Tracking

Last time, I went into detail about advanced segments in Urchin 7. Today, I want to cover event tracking. Event tracking is another useful feature migrated over from Google Analytics. With it, you can track interactions with your website that are not page views. For example, you can track online video interactions, pdf downloads, or clicks on banners on your website. In previous versions of Urchin, you could track these interactions as “virtual page views but doing so would affect pageview metrics such as bounce rate and time on site, as well as the navigation reports. With event tracking, these metrics and reports are not affected.

Implementation

Implementation of event tracking is quite easy. If you are already tracking events in GA, then it’s even easier. Simply enable local tracking in GA to send the event data to Urchin as well. If you had local tracking enabled already, you have the added benefit of all your historical event data in your raw logs. So if you want, you can reprocess your archived logs and get historical event data into your Urchin 7 reports!

If you aren’t using GA, then you will need to add some JavaScript function calls to the function “__utmTrackEvent”. The arguments for this function are:

• category – the category the event belongs to
• action – the action performed (ie. click)
• label – a label for the action
• value – a numeric value (optional)
• page – page the event occurred on (optional)

A typical event tracking scenario is tracking the number of times a video is played. To track this, you would simply attach an event listener to the “click” event for the play button. This event listener calls __utmTrackEvent with the arguments “videos” for category, “play” for action, and the name of the video for the label.

Using our video tracking example above, here are what some of the new Urchin 7 event tracking reports are.

The Hosts & Pages report will show you the number of events that occurred on each page. This report is useful for seeing which page generates the most events. The value for the page correlates to the “page” argument passed into the event tracking function. If no value was passed, the URL in the address bar is used.

The Categories report will show you the events by category.

The Actions report shows events broken down by action

The Labels report shows events broken down by label. Drilling down a level, you can see all actions that were associated with that label.

Finally, the Trending report shows total events, number of events with visits, and events per visit given the time frame selected.

With most of these reports, the ability to cross-segment is built in. So you can see which campaigns, sources, countries, etc generate the most events. What would have made this feature even more valuable is if they had included the ability to create advanced segments based off of events. Doing so would have allowed analysts to really dive deep!

Stay tuned for the next installment in the series: 7 Days of Urchin 7: Day 6 – Custom Reports & Data API

If you would like to read more about Urchin 7, please visit http://www.google.com/urchin.