Events

Pageviews arrive on their own. Events are the things you decided were worth measuring: a signup, a play, a plan chosen, a form failed. You send them from your site (Custom events); this page reads them back.

What it shows

• Events over time, stacked, for your five busiest event names in the range. Five keeps the chart legible; the rest are still counted in the list below.
• Top events: every event name with its count and share of the total.

Both respect the date range and every active filter, so “signups from Germany last week” is this page plus two clicks in Sessions.

Naming events well

The name is the whole interface here, and it is hard to change later without splitting your history in two. A few rules that age well:

• Name the thing that happened, not where the button was. signup beats hero-button-click. When you redesign the hero, signup still means what it meant.
• Stay consistent. signup, Signup and sign_up are three different events forever. Pick one shape and keep it.
• Keep the set small. Ten events you check beat sixty you never look at.
• Put the detail in properties, not the name. signup with plan: pro beats signup-pro, because you can still count all signups.

Turning an event into a rate

A count alone rarely answers a question. “How many signups” becomes useful as “what share of visitors signed up”, which is a Goal, or “where in the flow did people leave”, which is a Funnel. Both live in Reports.

Next: Compare.