Tracking Events in Google analytics using tag manager

Google Analytics comes out of the box automatically tracking pageviews and other common behaviors of your users. But, what if you want to track things like users scrolling to a certain point, clicking a button, or other unique activity that isn’t triggered by changing the page they are on? Well, that is where event tracking with Google Tag Manager comes into play. With just a few clicks, you can start tracking any activity that you can imagine on your website.

We recommend using Google Tag Manager for a few key reasons. The first is that you don’t have to add any additional code to your website. The second is that if Google changes anything on their end, your solution should continue to work. Finally, because of how simple the solution is, it is already easily viewable in the same dashboard as the rest of your Google Analytics data.

To set up an event trigger, you need to determine what events you want to track. You could go as far as tracking everything any user does on your website, but that is often overkill and can give you data overload. Therefore, I recommend tracking the actions that users have to make to complete a conversion on your website. This could be clicking add to cart, scrolling to read the description, or whatever other action you expect a customer to take.

After you know what you want to track, you need to implement the solution to actually track it. By nature, Google Tag Manager automatically records all site property activities and page views. It doesn’t document all of this stuff, though unless you order it to do so. The way you will instruct Google Tag Manager to follow the particular events and page views you want to send to Google Analytics or other resources is via triggers. We then need to inform Google Tag Manager that we want to give Google Analytics the events we compiled in the previous phase. We will use something called a selector of CSS elements to do this. CSS selectors are a little bit technical, but not too complicated for the average website owner to understand after a little bit of reading.

Let’s get our feet wet now that we have functionally learned how we can pick our cases. Google Tag Manager helps you to classify events on your website depending on the different attributes (these attributes are called ‘variables’) of the events. In Google Tag Manager, there are many built-in variables that you can use under the configure section.

Finally, you must set up the trigger by selecting a new trigger. Using the “some clicks” function in Google Tag Manager, you can insert the CSS selector of the element that you want to be tracked. Finally, in the Event Manager, you add the trigger with the tag, and presto, you’ve now set up complex tracking on your website!