Event tracking is one of the most useful features in Google Analytics.
With just a little bit of extra code, you can capture all kinds of information about how people behave on your site.
Event tracking lets you monitor just about any action that doesn’t trigger a new page to load, such as watching a video or clicking on an outbound link. This data can be invaluable in improving your site.
There are two different ways you can set up event tracking in Google Analytics. One way is to add the code manually. The other is to set up tracking through Google Tag Manager[1].
Both methods are doable without a developer, although you may find it easier to use Google Tag Manager if you have no coding experience.
How to set up event tracking manually
What exactly is an event? Before you start tracking events, it’s important to understand how they’re put together. Each event is made up of four components that you define. These are category, action, label, and value.
Category
A category is an overall group of events. You can create more than one type of event to track in the same category “basket.”
For instance, you could create a category called Downloads to group a number of different events involving various downloads from your site.
Action
An event’s action describes the particular action that the event is set up to track. If you’re tracking downloads of a PDF file, for instance, you might call your event’s action Download PDF.
Label
Your label provides more information about the action taken. For instance, if you have several PDFs available