Accessing Google Analytics Events Reporting #TIL

I’ve used Google Analytics for a while. I started using it for tracking pageviews on my personal blog. I was always surprised by the amount of links, reports/sub reports available on the left nav pane. Until now, I used only two or three of all the reports available.

Nav Pane — Google Analytics (sooo many reports)

This week, I added analytics code that tracked events on https://www.greppage.com . Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a page view. Examples of events are video plays, downloading content, clicking links, etc. Check out the Google documentation for custom events tracking API. You can send events to GA by doing something like this:

ga.send('event', {
  eventCategory: ‘Video’, 
  eventAction: ‘play’,
  eventLabel: 'Tutorial01'
});

I recommend using the Realtime Events view in GA to test your tracking code. You can get a real-time view of the events by clicking

Realtime > Overview.

To get a more comprehensive view (delayed by a day) of the events, access the summary report by clicking

Behavior > Events > Overview