Event Tracking

Event tracking is the practice of recording each meaningful user action in a site or app as a separate record with a name, a timestamp and its own properties.

Instrumentation code builds an event at the moment the action happens, puts it in a local queue in the browser and sends it to the collector in batches. In earlier tools event tracking was something separate from pageviews and was described with category, action and label fields; in the modern model a pageview is itself one of the events and shares the same structure. The common mistake is recording every click with no prior definition: volume grows, no business question becomes answerable, and storage cost rises for nothing.