Google Analytics Feature Activation: Event Tracking

"We are happy to let you know that the Event Tracking feature is now available in all profiles for the following Google Analytics Account ID: 123456"

This simple phrase means a lot. It means Google is enabling another feature that raise the bar to a new level and continues to significantly alter the playing field for any low to mid end competitors.

We are not bound to measure page views, visits and visitors anymore. We can truly measure significant activities going on our sites regardless of the way we decide to implement them: AJAX, Flash, Silverlight, widgets or others. Although there was ways to track downloads, video plays and other tricks using the regular page views, the side affect was also that some reports and metrics were affected. With events, a page view is a page view and an event is clearly an event.

Using event tracking

1. Update your ga.js file
2. Use the _trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value) function in your code.
   
   
   • The category is pretty obvious: Videos, Download, etc.
   • Action should be something like "Play", "Pause", "Stop", or a timestamp
   • The label allows you to distinguish, for example, which video is being played
   • The value is a way to tell Google Analytics about a timestamp, a count, or any numeric value that will be summed and averaged for each action and label
     
3. See the results under Content/Event Tracking in Google Analytics
   

Other cool stuff

A set of new event timer functions _recordStartTime(), _recordEndTime() and mouse over event tracking _trackMouseOver(). I can already imagine scenarios where those calls will come in handy!

Caveats

• Max of 500 events per visit... however, this should be plenty!
• If an event is fired on the first page of a visit, the visit will never be counted as a bounce. A bounce is usually defined as being a single page view, but since you fire an event, there are now two things happening, thus this visit isn't a bounce anymore. That one is a bit more tricky and could significantly affect some reports, segmentation and other calculations.
  

Hillstrom's open letter

I've been following Kevin Hillstrom's blog for a while. Kevin is a very experienced consultant in the field of multi-channel retailing and data mining, having worked for well known brands like Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, and Lands' End. Today, Kevin posted "An Open letter to the Web Analytics Community" where he ventures in some aspects of what I had covered in "Is Web Analytics too marketing centric?"

Kevin knows his stuff, you should definitely read his open letter. And I must say I agree with everything he is highlighting in his post:

• data integration across channels becomes a must
  
• move from reporting ratios to reporting revenues, benefits and costs. As he puts it "You will have to become good at calculating profit"
  
• become political by crafting "a story that blends their (executives) challenges with your vision, providing a compelling narrative that the executive takes on as her own vision"
• learn about all channels, not just the web
• if something doesn't exist in your current tool, "make it happen", go beyond the tool
• "stop doing what Google tells you to do", "start looking at your business the way your CEO or CMO wants to look at the business"

He concludes with "success is tied into your ability to link together all data within the company, to be able to tell a compelling story, and to be able to have executives trust you enough to make key business decisions based on your recommendations.". Very well put Kevin! :)

My take

I think one of the issue, just like in the early days of the web, is anyone and his dog becomes an expert at web analytics because they recently stumbled on Google Analytics. Web analytics has a good buzz, it's in high demand, and is quite young... so there are mistakes:

• seeing the web as a silo, floating by itself in the deep ocean of the Internet, rather than leveraging its unique characteristics to listen to customers wants and needs and continuously optimizing the business
  
• pouring money into marketing without optimizing processes, simply because measuring ROI on a PPC campaign is a lot easier than fixing that darn business process
  
• thinking in terms of visits instead of being truly customer centric, just because the tools make a poor job at integrating with other sources of data and reports their numbers in visits or inaccurate number of visitors
  
• thinking anyone in the office can be their web analytics guru without the proper experience, training, authority level and empowerment
  

When I do a web analytics maturity level assessment (see here and here), those are the types of issues I can uncover and for which I can propose realistic recommendations.

Kevin, you are right on, and I hope web analytics "experts" will embrace your recommendations as goals for 2009.

Online Customer Engagement Report 2009

For a third year, the Online Customer Engagement Report conducted by e-consultancy and sponsored by cScape Customer Engagement Unit is now available as a free download.

My take

I'm honored to be a contributor to this report. You can read my comments and those of other experts in the field: Alex Smith, Andy Beal, Backy Carroll, Ian Jindal, Jim Sterne, Martha Russell, Matthew Bailey and Peter Mortensen.

What strikes me is the growing gap between those who have defined a strategy and are taking control of it in-house, and those who are just seeking help from external agencies. While the first have established long term goals and will pursue the strategy despite the economic downturn, the later are much more likely to ditch their plan and focus on the very short term. Guess who will get the advantage!

Highlights

The third annual Online Customer Engagement Report is based on a survey of 1,300 respondents carried out in September and October 2008.

While the importance of customer engagement is widely acknowledged, fewer than half of organizations (45%) have defined a customer engagement strategy. Many are still unsure about how to implement a coherent and practical plan of attack. Only about half of respondents (51%) said that the deteriorating economic climate had resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement.

The essence of customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships which result in value both for customers and for organizations. Asked about their organization's interest in online customer engagement, 38% of respondents said that it was about "increasing long-term customer value" while 34% said that it was about "increasing value delivered to the customer".

Get more highlights from the report.