Event tracking: Understand and leverage user behavior across all platforms with RudderStack

Event Tracking

Event tracking gives businesses a competitive advantage by enabling a deeper understanding of customer movements across marketing channels.

Event tracking tools collect information on customer actions across mobile applications, websites, landing pages, and more, such as clicks, page views, or form submissions. Understanding these customer interactions allows businesses to optimize products, services, and marketing actions to provide personalized experiences, improve user engagement, and increase conversion rates.

In this article, we clearly define event tracking, explain how it works, and explore different event types, use cases, and tools for event tracking.

What is event tracking?

Event tracking monitors and collects the data from visitors interacting with your digital presence, whether on a web page, a mobile application, or elsewhere. Event types include page views, user clicks, form submissions, ecommerce purchases, and custom user actions.

Event data collection enables deeper customer behavior analysis. Connecting the dots of individual events allows businesses to discover usage patterns, optimize prospect and user funnels, uncover breakdowns in key workflows, customize user experiences, and ultimately reduce bounce rates, improve engagement, and increase conversions.

What types of data does event tracking include?

Event tracking covers a broad range of data types. Here are some of the most commonly tracked categories:

User interaction events

User interaction events are specific actions users perform on your web page or mobile application. They can include:

• Clicks: Tracking clicks on buttons, links, images, and other interactive elements
• Scroll depth: Tracking how far users scroll down pages
• Form submissions: Tracking submissions of forms
• File downloads: Tracking downloads of files
• Video engagement: Tracking video plays, pauses, and completions
• Search queries: Tracking keywords users search for on your website

User engagement events

User engagement is the level of interaction and involvement users have with your website, product, or service. This data reflects how invested users are in their experience. Some common user engagement events are:

• Time on page: Measures content engagement and user satisfaction
• Scroll depth: Discovers content visibility and gauges user interest
• Session repeats: Determines user satisfaction and brand stickiness
• Social shares: Measures content reach and topic resonance
• Commenting: Analyzes user engagement and content quality
• E-mail opens: Evaluates email deliverability and subject line effectiveness

Conversion events

Conversion events track key user actions that correspond to milestones in your business funnel. These actions indicate whether users are moving toward a desired outcome. Some conversion events include:

• Form submission: Tracking the submission of forms, which can indicate initial interest and provide details for lead generation
• Content download: Tracking downloads of white papers or other gated content provides insight into continued or growing interest
• Sign-ups: Tracking registrations for your service or account creations, which reflect initial commitment
• Cart additions: Tracking users adding items to their cart, indicating intent to purchase but not final commitment
• Checkout progression: Tracking the checkout process steps that lead to a purchase or drop-off offers insight into drop-off points
• Purchases: Tracking the completion of orders and transactions—the ultimate conversion goal!

Technical performance events

Technical performance events reflect the effectiveness and efficiency of your website or application's infrastructure and functionality. Some performance tracking events are:

• Page load times: Tracking the time it takes for pages to load
• Error occurrences: Tracking errors that occur on your website
• JavaScript errors: Tracking JavaScript errors that occur on your website
• Network activity: Tracking network requests and responses

It’s possible to track lots of other event types, but it’s important to avoid data overload. Before instrumenting code across every interaction, strategize with internal teams to identify and prioritize specific areas aligned with business goals. This focused approach ensures the event data captured fuels targeted analysis rather than overwhelming systems with data.

Exploring the benefits of event analytics with marketing use cases

Event tracking ties website behaviors to downstream efforts like multi-channel attribution, personalized messaging, and experience optimization. With event data, marketing teams can continually refine creative marketing strategies based on how customers engage over time.

Marketing and advertising

Event tracking allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and optimize ad targeting.

Businesses can identify which campaigns are succeeding and tailor their targeting to reach the most interested audiences by analyzing clicks, conversions, and social media engagement.

Additionally, event data helps personalize marketing communications and deliver relevant content to individual users based on their past behavior and preferences.

Website/app optimization

Event tracking helps identify popular content, optimize website or application flow, and troubleshoot user experience issues.

By tracking page views, time on page, and scroll depth, businesses can understand what content resonates best with users and identify areas for improvement in website/app navigation or functionality. Tracking error occurrences also provides valuable insights into technical problems impacting user experience.

Product development

Event tracking helps businesses understand user needs, prioritize feature development, and measure product adoption.

By analyzing in-app feature usage and user feedback, businesses can identify areas for product improvement and focus resources on developing features that users use and value most. Tracking user sign-ups, usage patterns, and engagement levels also helps businesses assess the overall success of their product.

Content management

Content creators use event tracking insights to publish content that resonates with their audience and optimize content distribution.

By analyzing content engagement metrics, such as page views, social shares, and comments, content creators can understand what types of content users find most valuable.

Event data is useful for personalizing content recommendations based on user interests and past behavior. The best channels and timing for publishing content to reach target audiences can also be identified using event data.

Attribute conversions

Event tracking allows marketers to stitch together the complete digital path customers take, from the initial touchpoint to, hopefully, the ultimate conversion.

Analysts can reconstruct each journey step by logging key interactions with campaign tags and UTM parameters. This can include which social media, SEO content, referral, or PPC ad introduces customers to the service, the landing pages they arrive at, the site content they view, and the final purchase or registration event.

Mapping this sequence enables visualization of the influence of marketing efforts. Attribution models can also use the insights to quantify each touchpoint's proportional credit for driving the result, providing more information than just last-click-wins-all. This fills attribution reporting with deeper truths around channel synergies, and the result is budget and resource allocation aligned to multi-faceted marketing strategies informed by user reality.

Understanding the inner workings of event tracking

With a better understanding of what event tracking is and why businesses can benefit from conducting event analytics, let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of an event tracking system. There are four main steps:

1. Define your events

• Identify the specific user actions you want to track. These could be custom events specific to your platform functionality or common actions, like button clicks, form submissions, and video plays.
• Define the event category, action, and label for each event. This helps organize your event data and makes it easier to analyze.

2. Implement tracking code

• Embed event tracking code (your analytics platform usually provides this) into your website or app code. Make sure to follow standard naming conventions for event names. These code snippets trigger an event hit whenever the configured event action occurs.
• For websites, you can use JavaScript libraries like Google Tag Manager (GTM) to create new tags or manage existing event tags. For mobile apps, you can use platform-specific SDKs provided by your analytics platform.

3. Collect event data

• The tracking code sends an event hit to your analytics platform when an event occurs. This hit will include the event name, category, action, label, timestamp, and associated user data.
• Your analytics platform then processes this data and makes it available for analysis in reports and dashboards.

4. Leverage event analytics

• Use the event data collected through event tracking to gain insights into user behavior. You can analyze how often users perform certain actions, which pages or features they interact with most, and how various marketing campaigns perform.
• These insights can inform your website or app development, marketing strategy, and overall business decisions.

A practical event tracking code example

Let’s look at a practical example of how event tracking code can work. Consider the code snippet below, which captures information about a user purchase action for an ecommerce site:

JSON

Copy

{

"event_name": "purchase",

"event_category": "Transaction",

"event_action": "Complete",

"order_id": "123456",

"order_total": 100.0,

"order_items": [

{

"product_id": "12345",

"product_name": "Eco-Friendly T-Shirt",

"product_quantity": 2,

"product_price": 35.0

},

{

"product_id": "54321",

"product_name": "Sustainable Hat",

"product_quantity": 1,

"product_price": 25.0

}

],

"user_id": "abc123"

}

This code defines the event being captured (the completion of a purchase). It includes various relevant data points—price, ordered items, and the customer making the order—so the business can perform useful data analysis.

For example, the business can determine the typical order size by averaging the ‘product_quantity’ values across all recorded purchase events. This can help them plan shipping methods, find effective upselling and cross-selling opportunities, and push customer loyalty schemes.

Note that using sensible variable names is important when writing event tracking code. This snippet would work the same if the ‘event_action’ variable were called ‘g8nfioak9’, but it would be much harder to sense-check or identify faults.

Getting started with event tracking tools

Event tracking requires systematic monitoring of user interactions. Trying to track events in an ad-hoc manner won’t work due to the huge amounts of data. With a dedicated event tracking tool, organizations can predefine events and standardize data collection and analysis methods for efficient and systematic event tracking. These tools also reduce manual errors and improve data quality with automations.

The essential event tracking tool features to look out for

Here are some of the most important features to consider when choosing an event tracking tool.

Real-time analytics: Real-time analytics continuously provide full visibility into your data, allowing you to act on current insights without delay. They can also help eliminate bottlenecks or catch fraud by identifying unusual behaviors. However, not all event tracking tools provide analytics in real time.

Scalability and flexibility: A reliable tool should scale with your business as it grows. This includes vertical and horizontal scaling, so check that any tool can handle increases in data volumes and types.

Tracking various user interactions and events across multiple channels is also crucial. Mobile apps, websites, and other digital platforms central to your business should be compatible with your event tracking tool.

Integrations: Seamlessly integrating new data sources with your existing tech stack is vital. Be sure to choose an event tracking tool that simplifies this process with native integrations or APIs and makes managing all your integrations easy.

Consider choosing a tool with bidirectional flow. These tools ingest data from multiple sources and also push it to downstream tools.

Data governance and security: When working with any type of data, it’s vital to comply with data privacy and protection regulations. Ensure proper data management by checking the legal frameworks the tool operates within (GDPR, for example) and looking for features like role-based access control and data anonymization.

RudderStack: A complete event tracking platform

RudderStack Event Stream offers all this and more. It collects and routes event data in real time from the web, mobile, and cloud-based sources and lets you track users across both client-side and server-side platforms.

It’s also fully customizable, so you can connect to any API endpoint or reshape data as it comes in, formatting data as needed for any system in your tech stack. That’s on top of over 200 integrations ready to go out of the box, including for big names like Salesforce and Google Analytics 4.

Event stream success story: Loveholidays

Loveholidays is one of the fastest-growing online travel agencies in the UK. Its search engine allows its over 20 million monthly visitors to search for holidays based on factors including hotel rating, budget per person, holiday type, or TripAdvisor rating.

The team at Loveholidays wanted to improve the service they were offering to customers by fine-tuning their search engine to provide more personalized output. They wanted to tie the search results to user ID without any slowdown in response times. They also needed a solution that would be GDPR-compliant.

But there was a problem—they needed a better understanding of how their users interacted with the Loveholidays site to do all this. At the time, they used Google Analytics 360 for user attribution, eventing, and reporting. But, there were several issues with this.

For one thing, Google Analytics 360 only exported data once every 24 hours, so it was fairly inflexible. The servers were also based in the US, which made GDPR compliance tricky. Finally, the overall depth of the available data simply wasn’t sufficient for Loveholidays to meet its goals.

Enter RudderStack. We worked with Loveholidays to create a custom JavaScript SDK designed according to their specifications. RudderStack’s cloud now processes user event data from the Loveholidays app and website and instantly routes it to Loveholidays’ BigQuery warehouse.

Now, instead of waiting 24 hours to access critical event data, the team at Loveholidays can get their hands on it every 15 minutes. The data is also much more detailed, which has allowed Loveholidays to develop an in-house experimentation platform for A/B testing. This has saved the company $500,000 a year in testing services.

Today, visitors to the Loveholidays website benefit from truly personalized search results, and the search speed is lightning-fast, too. Queries return within 20 milliseconds, as opposed to 200 milliseconds before the change.

Overall, implementing the RudderStack solution has increased conversions by 2% and saved Loveholidays a huge amount of time and money.

Optimize your event tracking with RudderStack

Event tracking unlocks valuable insights into customer behaviors across digital platforms. With event tracking data, businesses can quantify engagement, personalize messaging, attribute channel influences, and optimize product marketing decisions.

With RudderStack Event Stream and our Warehouse-Native CDP, you can efficiently integrate event tracking into your existing tech stack. Easily unify data from multiple sources, label and transform events in real time, and gain a clear understanding of your customer journey.

Discover how RudderStack Event Stream can simplify event tracking by signing up for our free trial today.