Screen tracking only offers data about the screens themselves. For app elements within each screen such as buttons, video controls, or other interactive elements, you can add Event tracking to each of those actions. The measurement plan you created can guide what events you should track based on your business objectives:
Introduction
Event tracking lets you track specific interactive elements and content within screens that might not otherwise be tracked. This includes button clicks, menu selections, mobile ad clicks, video plays, and swipes or other gestures. For example, you could use events to track when users click on a button that opens up a helpful tip overlay in a game. This could show you which levels users need help with and whether those tips assist them in the game.Tracking events
To track an event, you must first set up tracking in your account and then attach a method call to the particular screen element you want to track. You can include four parameters within the method: Category, Action, Label, and Value. We recommend that you define at least Category, Action, and Label.Categories allow you organize the events you track into groups such as “Videos” or “Social Shares.” Actions are strings used to describe an event. For example, you could create a category called “Videos” with the associated Actions “Play” and “Pause.” Labels are optional strings used to further describe the elements you’re tracking like the name of the video. Value is a numerical variable that you can use to collect customized values, like the amount of time it takes a video to load.
When a user interacts with the screen element being tracked, the values you assigned to these parameters will appear in the Events reports. Be mindful about how you name your categories, actions, and labels, so that when they show up in your reports they will organize your event data in a useful way.
When tracking Events, each interaction with a tracked element is counted and associated with a user’s session. In the Events reports, Total Events are calculated as the total number of interactions with the tracked element. For example, if a user clicks a tracked button in a game five times, the total number of button events will be “five,” but the number of Unique Events will be counted as “one.” Note that if you want to track multiple elements in a single screen, you’ll have to set up separate event tracking for each one of those elements.
Conclusion
You should also be judicious about what you track. Remember, you want to use event tracking to help increase engagement in a way that leads to monetization. There’s no point in tracking common interactions like a jump button in a game. Collecting that data won’t necessarily be useful and could cause you to quickly surpass collection limits in Google Analytics, resulting in incomplete session data. Instead, use your measurement plan to guide which interactions provide the most valuable data for your engagement and monetization goals.Practice Event Tracking analysis
The Great Outdoors has set up Event tracking on an offer for a free in-app fishing lure called “Free Nightcrawler” within Go Fish!. Every time a user clicks the offer, The Great Outdoors can measure that action, and use the data to determine whether it influences users’ other behaviors in the app. Let’s see what insights we can get from this event using the Analytics reports in AdMob:
In the navigation pane click Behavior, then Events. You’ll see three different reports: Overview, Top Events, and Screens. Click Overview.
The Overview report shows a summary of how well all of your events performed, organized by Category, Action, and Label. The Top Events report shows data on all Events sorted by those that users interact with most frequently, while the Screens report shows all the screens where Event interactions occurred sorted by most popular.
Click the Top Events report. Let’s scroll down. Here you can see the top event categories broken out by Total and Unique Events, as well as their event value and average value. Note that you’ll need to set up the Event Value component in order to get this data.
If we look at the “Free Nightcrawler Event” category, we can see that this represents one of Go Fish!’s most popular events. We can see the Total Events (or how many clicks the Free Gear offer received), as well as Unique Events (or how many sessions included a click on the offer). We can also determine the total and average values of free equipment to better compare the value of goods offered for free versus how much revenue the app is bringing in.
Now let’s use the power of segmentation to see whether users who clicked on the “Free Nightcrawler” promo ended up spending more money within their sessions than those who didn’t. Let’s first create a segment for users that clicked on the offer. Click “Add Segment.” Then click “New Segment.”
Let’s name the segment: “Sessions with Free Nightcrawler.” Since we want to measure behavior by a particular condition, under Advanced click “Conditions.” Since we want to see how the free offer influenced behavior per session, leave the filters set to “Sessions” and “Include.” Now, we’ll click the main Condition drop-down and do a search for the dimension “Event Category.” Since we want to segment by the free nightcrawler offer, we’ll type the name of the offer in the Contains field. To continue, click Save.
We’ll also create a segment called “Sessions without Free Nightcrawler.”
Now, let’s jump into the Ecommerce Overview report to apply the segment. Note that in order to access these reports, you’ll need to enable Enhanced Ecommerce in your account and set up the tracking in your app, which we’ll cover in a later lesson.
We can see that sessions in which users claimed the free offer had higher revenue and ecommerce conversion rates than those that didn’t. This suggests that the free offer leads users to spend more money in the app, so it might be an effective way to get game players to engage with the in-app store.
Let’s look at whether this free offer also engages users. In the navigation pane, click Audience. Then click Overview.
Let’s scroll down a little. In this report, we can compare these segments across users, sessions, screens, and session duration. Notice that more users clicked on the offer within one of their sessions than didn’t click the offer. And we can see by looking at the session duration that those who clicked the offer had more screens per session and longer session durations than those who didn’t.
This suggests that users who click the offer stay more engaged with the game. The Great Outdoors may want to offer more free in-app lures and equipment to keep users playing longer. We can also compare the segments we created across demographics, app info, and device type.
Click Screen Resolution. We can see that in sessions with larger screen resolutions, users tend to click the offer. In sessions with smaller screen resolutions, almost no users click the offer. This might mean that the offer is not displaying correctly on smaller screens. The Great Outdoors should double-check these screen resolutions to see if there are any sizing or other user experience issues to fix.
These are just a few examples of how you can use event tracking in conjunction with segmentation to understand which behaviors drive user engagement and monetization.
--
