When website visitors interact with your web pages, for example, when they click on a link, or navigate to a different page, an event is generated in the browser.
Google Analytics 4 collects these different events and sends them to Google, to be recorded and analyzed.
Events are considered fundamental data representing a user interaction with your website. Through events, you are able to track your user behavior, engagement, and ultimately, their conversions.
Conversions are important because they represent a little stepping stone in your customer's journey.
Engaging and interacting with your site makes your prospects move towards accomplishing the goals you assigned them on your website. Step by step they fall a little further into your funnel until they reach the end.
Events capture important information on how users interact with our web pages and pass this information along to Google Analytics using parameters.
If you think of an event as a train, parameters are the passenger cars pulled by the engine to the station.
What are parameters?
Parameters are just data attached to events and provide additional information and context to the event itself.
An example would be a page view event. By itself, it tells us that a visitor
viewed a page. That's a good thing, but it would be helpful to know which page
was viewed so we could have an idea of which pages work, and which pages don't.
Parameters attached to the event tell us which page was viewed and its location,
using the page location and page title parameters associated with the page
view event.
Google automatically collects several parameters for each event.
For example, page location and page title are passed by default
to Google Analytics for each event collected.
But, how do you know which parameters are collected by default?
You can see these default parameters in your Google Analytics dashboard.
After logging into your account,
go to Reports > Engagement > Events and click on an event name, like
page_view.
You will see a Parameter name drop-down menu. Click on it, and it will reveal
all the parameters collected with that event, including page_title, and
page_location.
Clicking on the page_title parameter will show you a list of page titles, with the count of
how many times they were viewed.
So, now you know which pages were viewed the most and can have a better idea of
what works on your website.
To summarize
Google Analytics collects data about web page visits through
events.
Events are user interactions with your website, like a page view or a click.
The importance of events is that they represent small steps on your customer journey. By interacting with your website she is saying: "yes, I am interested in this. Let's keep going". All these tiny conversions will lead to larger conversions, like subscribing to your newsletter, generating a lead, or making a purchase.
Many events are already collected by default and available in our Analytics reports, but Google lets you also create your own custom events, since each site is unique and may need specific events that are not available generally.
You may think of an event as a train with several passenger cars. The cars represent the parameters attached to the event. These parameters collect data related to the event and allow you to paint a better picture of what your visitors do on your website.
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