Event tracking setup
Event tracking helps you gain valuable insights into how users interact with your website or product. Events are specific user actions you want to track, like signing up for a free trial, downloading a file, clicking a link, or completing a purchase.
Why event tracking matters
- For websites and E-commerce stores: Track conversions, conversion rates, referrer sources, entry pages, and top-performing pages to achieve your goals.
- For SaaS products: Understand user behavior, analyze product usage, and identify areas for improvement by tracking actions users perform in your product.
Usermaven makes event tracking seamless with auto-capture, pinned events, and custom events, offering flexibility and ease of use. This guide explains how to configure and optimize these methods for actionable insights.
Auto-capture event tracking
Usermaven automatically tracks front-end events, if enabled in your tracking script. This makes it easy to track data such as clicks, input changes and form submits performed by users on your website, e-commerce store, or SaaS app. This saves you time and eliminates the need for developers to track changes manually.
What auto-capture tracks:
- Page views (tracked even if auto-capture is off)
- Clicks on buttons, links, images, icons, headings, etc.
- Changes in input fields, text areas, or dropdowns
- Form submissions
- Events from pop-ups
Note: Auto-capture does not track events in iframes and excludes sensitive data like passwords. Only the name, id, and class attributes of input fields are captured for security reasons.
Pinned events
Pinned events let you focus on key user actions such as signups, purchases, and downloads.
- Individual pinned events: Monitor a specific button or action on a single page.
- Grouped pinned events: Track similar actions across multiple pages, like identical buttons on different sections.
For detailed examples, refer to our pinned events guide. (opens in a new tab)
Custom event tracking
Custom events are ideal for advanced use cases that auto-capture can’t handle, such as:
- Tracking actions in iframes, like payment forms or embedded videos.
- Capturing events from external sites, e.g., checkout processes completed elsewhere.
- Monitoring form submissions without a "thank you" page.
With custom events, you can track specific actions using Usermaven’s JavaScript API or backend methods. This ensures you capture only the data that matters most. Learn more in our custom events guide (opens in a new tab).
Optimizing event tracking
Managing auto-capture data overload
While auto-capture is convenient, it can generate a large volume of data, making analysis difficult and increasing costs.
Capturing every single click on a website results in a vast amount of data. This can overwhelm individuals that only require information on specific actions. Thus, analyzing this extensive data becomes difficult, hindering the extraction of meaningful insights.
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. You might have to pay additional fees to overcome limitations and access the necessary data, potentially exceeding your budget.
To manage this:
- Navigate to Workspace settings → Setup in your Usermaven dashboard.
- Toggle off “Automatically capture frontend events” to disable auto-capture.
- Add the updated tracking script to your website's header.
This ensures you only track essential custom events, making your data more relevant and cost-effective.
