Product Manager, Reteno
March 20, 2025
It's one thing to get users to visit your website or try your app, and it's another to know exactly what they do on your platform. This is where event tracking comes into play. It is a revolutionary data analytics technique that provides detailed insights into how users interact with digital platforms. Read on to find answers to common questions about event tracking.
Event tracking is an advanced analysis of the interactions users have on your website or mobile app. It goes beyond common metrics like page views to track specific and minute details and heat maps that can help you better understand user behaviors, user experience, and the overall performance of your platform.
For instance, if you want to know how engaging your home page is, you could monitor how fast users scroll through the website and the farthest depth they take. Further, you could track how often they engage with the CTA, how much time they spend on each section of the page.
This may look like a lot, but when done properly and carefully, event tracking reports will help you increase user engagement, retention rate, and app conversions.
To keep track of specific events or actions on your digital platform, you need to install some codes on the section of the platform you want to monitor user interaction events. JavaScript is the common programming language used for this purpose. However, you also need an event-tracking data analytical tool to implement the code.
Suppose you want to know how many times and how often the “Play” button on a demo video is hit. In that case, you'd install the code on the exact page where the video is, instructing it to count each time a user presses the button and the time interval between them. Here's an example of such a code:
<script>
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
let lastPlayTime = 0; // Stores the timestamp of the last play event
// Select the video element by ID (Replace 'demoVideo' with your actual video ID)
let video = document.getElementById("demoVideo");
if (video) {
video.addEventListener("play", function () {
let currentTime = new Date().getTime(); // Get current timestamp
let timeInterval = lastPlayTime ? (currentTime - lastPlayTime) / 1000 : 0; // Calculate interval in seconds
// Update last play timestamp
lastPlayTime = currentTime;
// Send event to Reteno
if (typeof reteno !== "undefined" && reteno.track) {
reteno.track("video_play", {
category: "Video",
label: "Demo Video",
time_interval: timeInterval, // Time since last play event
});
}
console.log("Reteno: Video play event tracked. Time interval:", timeInterval, "seconds");
});
}
});
</script>
We generated this code using the Reteno tracking platform. You can do something similar for any other event on your platform and get relevant insights for growing your business and customer engagement.
Reteno tracks two main types of event data: system-generated events and custom events.
These events are automatically collected and include user interactions with omnichannel campaigns. Examples include:
These are user-interaction events based on behavioral analytics of users within an app, website, CRM, or CMS interactions:
By following these event tracking best practices, businesses can optimize their analytics strategy and improve overall performance.
Before you think about implementing event tracking, it is important to understand and establish a very detailed and structured tracking plan. It should cover what part of your page or website would be tracked, the mode of tracking, and the event tracking tool to be used. A clear and well-defined tracking plan ensures that the collected data aligns with your business goals.
It involves designing a consistent pattern for naming events. Two common naming formats are snake_case and CamelCase.
In snake_case, all the letters are in lower case, and words are separated by “-” or “_” e.g., page-viewed and user_signup.
In CamelCase, the first word is in lowercase or capitalized, and the first letter of the subsequent words is capitalized. Examples are PageViewed and UserSignup.
We recommend you use the CamelCase format
Using a standardized and consistent naming style helps simplify data identification and analysis in a system.
Instead of having a vague event-tracking system, you should focus on capturing only relevant data that aligns with your objectives. This would go a long way in further simplifying your organization’s data-driven decision-making. Some user interaction events that could be tracked include successful sign-ups, purchases, bounce rate, completed actions, and pageview.
Your data will only be relevant if it’s accurate and devoid of discrepancies. The presence of errors, inconsistencies, and missing details in your recorded event tracking data will lead to misleading insights and wrong decisions. So, it’s necessary to build a standard quality control system around your operations to ensure consistent and reliable data gathering. This will help your business make data-driven decision-making confidently.
When users onboard your platform, they typically get a unique user ID (external ID for Reteno). This ID can be a source of digital trails when they interact with your platform. This way, you can record their behavioral analytics and use the information to offer personalized experiences.
Event properties and context are additional information that makes the data obtained from event tracking more meaningful and insightful. Instead of generic data like timestamps, event names, and engagement metrics, you could drill it down to event-tracking properties like device type, location, referral source, and user roles. Collecting contextual information allows you to carry out user segmentation and personalization.
Integrating your event-tracking tools with other analytic tools improves the success rate of your business events and behavior-tracking game. Analytic tools could include customer relationship management (CRM) and messaging automation tools like Reteno that could help increase your mobile app user retention rate.
Local and international laws frown against the indiscriminate gathering of customers' data. Most important laws in this domain are the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Before implementing any event tracking system for your company, ensure that the platform you’re using is fully compliant with the relevant laws and will not do anything to evade your users’ privacy.
While there are several event-tracking tools to choose from, these are proven to be the best and most result-driven:
Reteno is perhaps the most powerful, efficient, and accurate event-tracking tool in the market, judging by its wide range of services and hundreds of top-tier clients. It’s an omnichannel marketing platform that enhances app user retention through personalized, event-triggered campaigns. With Reteno, you can obtain real-time analytics that could be used to carry out user segmentation, automate omnichannel marketing journeys, and conduct automated A/B testing to improve the quality of services you are rendering.
Amplitude is one of the best event-tracking tools that offers product analysis on websites and mobile apps. It helps the team comprehend user behavior across all platforms and tailor personalized experiences. With retention analysis, funnel tracking, and A/B testing capabilities, Amplitude empowers businesses to optimize their digital products effectively.
Mixpanel is a product analytics and event-tracking tool that tracks custom events and analyzes user interactions in real time. One of Mixpanel's standout features is its ability to conduct cohort analysis, which helps businesses understand user behavior over time. Also, it offers flexible data visualization tools and allows for seamless integration with other platforms.
Heap is an event-tracking tool that has an automated system of operation. It provides businesses with a comprehensive dataset for analysis by automatically recording all user interactions on a website or application, including clicks, form submissions, and page views.
Pendo is a user analytics and product experience platform that enhances product adoption. By providing in-depth event tracking data on product usage and conducting sentiment analysis, businesses can use this event tracking tool to improve their user experiences.
Event tracking is a strategic approach for businesses that operate on digital platforms through websites and mobile and desktop apps. It helps organizations have a clearer glimpse of user interaction events and allows for monitoring the success rate of their omnichannel customer journey, among many other benefits. You can sign up now for free and explore how to integrate Reteno’s event tracking into your business and maximize its numerous benefits.
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