Understanding Key Events in Google Analytics 4 Tracking

Hello and welcome to section 7 of the Google Analytics Bootcamp, where we'll be discussing key events tracking. What are key events, the different types of key events you may track on your website, the Google Analytics 4 default events, how to create custom events, and the key steps to setting up key events tracking? So what is key event tracking? A key event is a valuable action that a user takes after clicking on a website.

It represents the completion of a desired objective that aligns with the brand's marketing campaign goals. Key events can include conversions, but are not limited to just conversions. There are other activities that you can also set up as key events.

In many cases, you're tracking activities that will eventually lead to conversions. By tracking key events, marketers can determine which campaigns, which traffic sources, and which tactics are driving the most valuable actions on their website and adjust their marketing strategies and campaigns accordingly in efforts to maximize the return on investment. So let's discuss some of the different types of key events that we can track.

Ecommerce transactions. If you have an online store, tracking ecommerce transactions is crucial. This includes purchases made on your website along with metrics like overall revenue, average order value, the specific products that are sold, and other transaction details.

You can also track enrollments. If you are marketing energy service as one of my clients does, and we are tracking enrollments on a website, people signing up for energy plans, people subscribing, all that type of activity. Form submissions.

Tracking form submissions is essential if your website is dedicated to lead generation. This can include contact forms, request a quote forms, sign up for newsletters, registration forms, etc. Similarly, subscription signups.

Downloads. If you offer download resources such as ebooks, white papers, or apps, you can track all these downloads on your website as well. Video views.

So again, this is not a conversion, but it might be a video that could hopefully lead to a conversion by providing important information for customers, information that might influence customers positively. So you can track the video views and not just how many people are clicking on a video, but what percentage of the video has been seen. You can also track app installations, event registrations, and just some of the different types of events that can be tracked on Google Analytics.

All right, so there are some GA4, Google Analytics 4 default events, meaning that you don't have to create these events. You don't have to customize and create a custom event. These are already there.

You can just identify that, hey, this is a key event for my website, and I'll show you how to do that in a moment. So this includes basic website and app interactions such as page views. One thing to note is that when you label anything on Google Analytics 4, it's page underscore view session underscore start.

That is the nomenclature that is used. So here we're talking about page views, session starts every time someone visits your website, it starts the session, user engagement, scroll, meaning what percentage of the screen that they actually scrolled, saw, screen view, how many times that particular screen was seen. And you can see some of the others, content interaction for ecommerce website, view item lists, people who are viewing a particular item, add to cart, purchase, all the common ecommerce interactions, many of them are already default events.

Video events, I was alluding to this earlier, how many people are starting the video, video start, video progress, it tracks numerically, it's a metric showing what percentage of the video people are seeing. So thinking about that, if you identify video views as a key event, you can determine to create an audience who you can remarket to of people who have viewed at least half of the video, right? So as long as that's a key event, video progress, you can do something along those lines. Or people who have completed the video, video complete.

I also mentioned forms, right? So a key event is a form start that shows the percentage of how many people have started a form. And then form submit, how many people have completed? So let's just say you notice you're tracking both these events, and you notice that only 50% of the people who started a form have finished a form.

That might indicate to you that the form might be too long or too complex, or asking people to provide information that they don't want to provide. So you might want to track that event metric to see if you can get a smaller drop-off, you know, get 80% of the people who start to form to fill it out. That's the type of insight that you can gain by tracking this event, which can help you optimize your lead generation process by improving the form.

Notification events can also be default events. Outbound clicks, it'll track when people are leaving your website to other websites, you know, could be to your social media sites, blog, or wherever else, whatever links you have. And they also have, it'll also track events around ads.

People are clicking on an ad, people have seen an ad, you know, impressions, exposure, etc. And some more ecommerce events, including a unique identifier for a transaction, a transaction ID, value, the monetary value of each purchase, the currencies being used, if there's a coupon involved, you know, the affiliates, the store location, the brand, the category of the item. Again, I use the example of men's apparel, cookware, you know, however, the items are categorized on the site.

And item ID, a unique identifier for the item. So here are some of the, you know, basic G4 default events. Some of its tracks, as we saw, include basic website and app interaction, content interactions, you know, what people are viewing on your website, what they're checking out, forms, you know, videos, forms, and a number of ecommerce, a number of types of ecommerce transactions and activities.