Webmaker/Metrics/GA-Events
Google Analytics Events Tracking ‘Events’ in GA are any interaction you want to track that isn’t recorded as a pageview (i.e. the user does something, or we do something, but the URL they are on doesn’t change). By default, GA records page loads. Everything else we want to track needs to be ‘logged’ as a custom 'Event' by firing some extra JavaScript. === Guidelines for tracking events == If in doubt, track more events rather than less. Tracking events is cheap (just a few additional lines of code throughout an app) but it adds a wealth of data to our records. == Never track personal information: This applies to all GA tracking, but double check you don’t log any email addresses or user_ids in event descriptions for example. == Distinguish between events driven by the user, and events driven by us: If an event is driven by us, e.g. displaying an alert or sign-up prompt with JavaScript, this should be recorded as a ‘non-interaction’ event because events are part of the bounce-rate calculation. A) If a user does something active on the site, like editing a page in Thimble, they should not be attributed as a bounced visit just because they stayed on a single URL while on the site. B) However, sometimes we want to record events for our analysis that are driven by us (such as displaying an alert, or auto playing something on a page), and this is not driven by the user; these are ‘non-interaction’ events. == Naming convention: Events have 3 levels of naming: category > action > label This allows us to record quite granular data, and do all sorts of analysis later (e.g. complexity of popcorn videos made by referring URL) I've suggested a way to name these for webmaker in a seperate pad. https://etherpad.mozilla.org/webmaker-ga-events-naming-convention == Annotations (being a good GA citizen) When you add new GA tracking like Events to any property, it’s helpful to add an annotation in GA so people looking at reports no why a new event suddenly appears/disappears in the data. If you have reporting access you can do this directly, or note the change and the date for someone else to add. == Dev Guides Tracking events using the old GA tag: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide Tracking events using the new GA analytics.js tag: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events