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Event Tracking Pt. 3: Reporting & Analysis

Posted: 16 Comments

This is part three of a three part series about event tracking in Google Analytics. You can find more information in these other posts:

Event Tracking Pt. 1: Overview & Data Model
Event Tracking Pt. 2: Implementation

I wrote this post before having access to the new events reports. As a result, I don’t have any screen shots for you guys! Sorry I don’t have anything to show you guys, but I will try to explain as much as possible.

The new event reports section will have specific reports for objects, actions and labels. If you have not read my post on the event data model then I strongly suggest that you do so. The data model is the driving force behind the structure of the reports.

Event reports will let you see summary information at an Object level, action level and value level. Here’s an example using Google Maps. If we create a ‘Map’ object then we will get a unique count of how many times the map object has been created. We can then drill into that event and see the actions and values of those actions.


Map
|_ Click Map View
|_ Satellite
|_ Hybrid
|_ Map
|_ Traffic
|_ Street view

This drill-down functionality is very similar to the drill down that you can do with campaign tracking.

The interface will also show you the values of each label. Remember, Satellite, Hybrid, Map, Traffic and Street view, are all labels and they have an associated value. GA will total up the value and show a unique count of how many times each action happened, the total value and the average value.

This is fantastic information because we can now measure what people are doing on our media rich pages. We no longer need to rely on Average Time on Page to gauge the success of our content.

I know this is really high level, and I’m sorry I don’t have any screen shots, but I’ll try to get some soon. Hopefully you got a taste of what is possible with the event reporting.

Comments

  1. Flame says

    G’day, I’ve moved from GA’s urchin to ga.js and am using an event tracker. For the life of me though I can not find any event report tool in GA. The data is being evaluated because it’s affecting my stats but I can’t see a way to view the actual event data. Is it available yet or still coming?

    Reply

  2. Justin Cutroni says

    Hi Flame,

    The reporting side of event tracking is not yet available. Sorry about that, I should have made it more clear. I’m not sure when it will be out, but it sounds like you’ll be ready! :)

    Thanks for the comment,

    Justin

    Reply

  3. Flame says

    Thanks, Justin. I wasn’t sure since even the GA help/doco indicates the data can be viewed. Will just have to wait.

    Thanks for a good site. Merry Christmas!

    Reply

  7. Evan Mullins says

    Yes! I second that notion! The whole idea of Event Tracking is awesome, and it will be nice when the reporting is made available to all GA users.
    I was confused for a while, searching through the Google Analytics help documentation where they list out how to turn on event tracking reporting, you just go to your account settings and click the box labeled “Event Tracking Enabled” – Google Event Tracking Setup Guide. I found no such options…
    Justin, great posts, I really learn what I come to learn, I’ve become a regular!

    Reply

  10. Malcolm Sequeira says

    Hi Justin, sorry to be the umpteenth person asking the same question – any idea on when reporting will be available?

    Thanks much,

    Malcolm

    Reply

  11. Luke Stevens says

    I’ve just noticed the ‘Event Tracking’ report (under ‘Content’) has appeared in client profiles – looks like they’ve finally activated it!

    Thanks for the great series on this too Justin, hopefully everyone will be able to take a second look now it is being rolled out more widely.

    Reply

  12. steve wardle says

    Event tracking has been in place now for well over a month (as of dec.08.08).

    Such a great addition to reporting as the data is so much more valuable than before. We have over 1200 docs on site and just to be able to break the report up to doc type and then title.

    Superb!

    Reply

  13. Matthew Self says

    I have the event tracking beta enabled for my site, but I have a few questions on how the reports work.

    1) Is there a way to see what pages events are occurring on? The necessary data all seems to be passed up to GA, but I don’t see a way to get to this in the reports. If you select a certain event, the drop down of Dimensions to drill in on does not include the Page that the event happened on.

    2) Is there a way to create a filter for events? I use filters to tack different subdirectories of my site in different profiles, but I don’t see any way to split up the reporting of events into separate profiles in a similar way.

    Reply

  14. Justin Cutroni says

    Hi Matt,

    1. No, you can’t see which pages the events are occuring on. This is a major limitation. You could encode that data into the category/action/label name, but there isn’t a report that splits it out by page.

    2. No, filters suck at filtering events. This is a huge issue as we need to filter event data in the same way that we filter pageview data.

    Thanks for the questions,

    Justin

    Reply

  15. sunil says

    Hi,

    Could anyone please let me know how i can activate the reports on my GA account. I am sending event data to GA but i dont have the Event reporting option.

    I am manipulating the URL to gain access to event data. Is Event reporting and event tracking live or still in beta?

    Thanks,
    Sunil

    Reply

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