Event tracking
Event tracking is the collection and analysis of specific user interactions, or events, that occur within a website, application, or marketing communication. An ‘event’ in this context is any discrete user action: clicking a button, submitting a form, playing a video, scrolling to a specific point on a page, downloading a file, or navigating from one section to another. Event tracking tools record when these actions happen, who performed them, and in what context. This data is then used to understand how users engage with content, where they encounter friction, and which paths lead to conversion.
Event tracking is typically implemented through a combination of tag management tools (such as Google Tag Manager) and analytics platforms (such as Google Analytics 4 or Mixpanel). In email specifically, click tracking through your ESP records which links in an email were clicked by which contacts. In web analytics, event tracking supplements basic page view data with the richer behavioural intelligence needed to optimise user journeys and campaign performance.
For B2B marketing teams, event tracking is what connects campaign activity to outcomes. Knowing that a contact opened an email is useful. Knowing that they then clicked through to a pricing page, spent four minutes scrolling, and then submitted a demo request tells a much more complete story. That level of behavioural intelligence, aggregated across many contacts, informs decisions about content strategy, funnel optimisation, and lead qualification that would be impossible to make from page view data alone.
What is the difference between page views and events in analytics?
A page view records when a user loads a URL. An event records when a user takes a specific action, which might happen on that same page. A single page visit can generate multiple events: a user might view a page, scroll 75 percent down, click a CTA, and play an embedded video, generating four separate events from one page view. Events give you a much more detailed picture of how users are actually engaging with your content, beyond the fact that they visited a URL.
How do you set up event tracking on a website?
The most common approach is to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to deploy tracking tags and event triggers without modifying your website’s code directly. In GTM, you define triggers (conditions that cause a tag to fire, such as a click on a specific button) and tags (the code that sends the event data to your analytics platform when the trigger fires). Google Analytics 4 natively tracks many common events automatically, but custom events for business-specific actions require manual configuration. Your web team or a marketing operations specialist typically handles initial setup.
Can event tracking work in email as well as on websites?
Yes, though the mechanisms are different. In email, click tracking is the primary event type: your ESP replaces the original URLs in your email with tracking URLs that log the click and then redirect to the destination. Some ESPs also support custom event tracking through their APIs, allowing you to log additional actions taken after a contact clicks through to your site. Connecting email click data to on-site behaviour tracking (via UTM parameters passed through tracked links) allows you to follow a contact’s journey from email click to on-site action in a single analytics view.