Event tracking setup
Event tracking is a powerful feature that helps you get better insights into how your users interact with your website and product. Events are the actions that you want users to perform such as sign-up for a free trial, download a file, click on a link, or checkout on your e-commerce store etc.
For websites and e-commerce stores, events will help you track conversions, conversion rates, referrer sources, entry pages, and top pages that help users perform desired goals.
For SaaS products, the first step in improving a product is to analyze users' behavior. Event tracking collects the information you require to comprehend how your product is used, perform analysis, and decide what improvements to make. Ideally, an event can be captured each time a user performs an action to help you better understand how your product is used.
Usermaven offers auto-capture, pinned and custom events as distinct methods for event tracking. This guide comprehensively covers these, walking you through the process of configuring auto-capture events, delving deeper into the realm of custom events, and subsequently customizing these events to capture the specific insights you aim to gather.
Auto-capture event tracking
Usermaven can capture all front-end events automatically if you have this option enabled in your tracking script. This feature makes it easy to start getting data such as clicks, input changes and form submits performed by users on your website, e-commerce store, and SaaS app.
Auto-capture saves you from the hassle of getting assistance from developers everytime you add or change something to your website and product.
What Auto-capture can or cannot track?
Usermaven's auto-capture technology grabs most of the frontend elements like clicks on button, link, image, div, span
- Page view (will be captured even if auto-capture is turned off)
- Click on elements such as button, link, image, div, span, icon, headings, etc.)
- Change in an input, textarea, or select element
- Form submission
Note that the above events will also be captured from pop-ups. But events that occur in an iframe are not tracked by Usermaven's auto-capture.
For security reasons, Usermaven is conservative regarding the input tags. In order to prevent passwords or other sensitive data from being collected, Usermaven's auto-capture will grab only the name, id, and class attributes from input tags.
Pinned events
This feature stands out as one of the most crucial elements in making event tracking easy and powerful.
Pinned events represent the top actions and events to monitor, such as signups, purchases, button clicks, downloads, etc.
- You can mark an individual item as a pinned event, for example, a button on a specific page.
- You can group similar items as a pinned event, for example, a similar button that's present on different pages.
To learn more about pinned events with examples, check this detailed guide
Custom event tracking
While auto-capture is a great solution for most of Usermaven's users, we know that some of our users may have different needs, for example;
- For some advanced scenarios such as sending events on a function call in your backend or third-party embedded content (chat windows, Youtube videos, order forms, etc.), custom event tracking will be required.
- Auto-capture grabs large volumes of data, it can be overwhelming for some of you to manage that data. In this case, you may want to disable auto-capture and use custom event tracking. Although, we recommend keeping auto-capture active to track every event retroactively. You can use those event later at any stage.
A few examples of what you can use custom events for:
- Events that occur in an iFrame - an embedded element that isn’t tracked by auto-capture, such as a payment form, chat component, or a YouTube video.
- Events coming from a different site, such as a checkout process that ends on an external site.
- Form submissions with no thank you page. While Usermaven tracks all clicks on the submitting button, you can use custom events to track successful form completion.
Custom events allow you to capture details from anywhere in the codebase whether it is a button press on the frontend or a class method call on the backend. This ensures correct and comprehensive data capture.
To send new custom events to Usermaven, you can utilize Usermaven's Javascript API. You or your developer can read more about it in this guide on sending custom events.
How To Reduce the Number of Events Being Tracked in Usermaven?
Usermaven’s auto-capture feature automatically captures front-end events for pre-defined user activities, such as page views, button clicks, page scrolls, form submissions, etc. While this is a convenient way to keep track of user activities on your platform, it can have certain limitations too.
Capturing every single click on a website results in a vast amount of data. This can overwhelm users who only require information on specific actions. Thus, analyzing this extensive data becomes difficult, hindering the extraction of meaningful insights. Moreover, this data overload can limit your ability to focus on crucial user interactions. Essential events might get lost in the noise, making it challenging to understand user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
Lastly, for analytics tools like Usermaven that bill individuals based on the number of events consumed, auto-capture of events can quickly lead to you exceeding event limits. This can result in limitations on data collection, hindering your ability to gain comprehensive insights. Also, you might have to pay additional fees to overcome limitations and access the necessary data, potentially exceeding your budget.
To prevent this from happening, Usermaven empowers you to manage event capture on your website. Here’s how you can do it:
- Navigate to your Usermaven Workspace Settings and click on ‘Setup’.
- Look for a toggle switch labeled ‘Automatically capture frontend events (e.g., button clicks, form submissions).’ Disable this option to turn off the auto-capture of events.
- Once done, add the updated script to your website's header section.
This will ensure that only your custom events get tracked and that your website analytics data is relevant and cost-effective, ultimately leading to more actionable insights for your business.
