events
An event is a single recorded action a visitor takes on your site, such as a phone tap, a form submission or a booking click, tracked separately from the page it happened on.
An event is one specific thing a visitor does on your site, recorded as its own line rather than folded into a generic pageview. Someone taps your phone number: that is an event. They submit a contact form: another event. They click a booking button: another one again. Where a pageview just tells you a page loaded, an event tells you what someone actually did once they got there.
This matters because pages do not book jobs. Actions do. A service page that gets a thousand views and zero phone taps is not doing its job, and you would never know that from pageviews alone. Events are how you find out whether a page is actually working, not just being looked at.
Events are also the raw material for almost everything downstream. Conversion tracking is built from events. A funnel is a sequence of events in order. Without events defined clearly, there is nothing solid to build a funnel or a conversion report on top of.
Why it matters to you
Most small business owners do not care about traffic for its own sake. They care about calls, bookings and quote requests. Events are the bridge between the two. Without them, “the website is doing fine” is a guess based on a general feeling. With them, it is a number you can check.
Events also expose problems fast. If phone-tap events drop to zero one week, either nobody is visiting the pages with a phone number on them, or the tracking broke. Either way, that is worth knowing right away rather than at the end of the quarter.
How I set it up
I define events around the actions that mean something to the business before touching any code: phone taps, form submissions, booking clicks, sometimes a click to a specific service page. I set these up through Google Tag Manager or directly in the site’s code, depending on the platform, so each one fires consistently and lands in Google Analytics or PostHog with a clear, readable name.
I keep the list short on purpose. A dashboard with forty tracked events nobody looks at is worse than five events tied directly to what makes the business money. If a new action becomes worth tracking later, I add it, but I do not track everything just because it is technically possible.
What it looks like in practice
In reporting, events show up as counts next to the pages or campaigns that generated them. A service page report might read: 400 sessions, 12 phone-tap events, 3 form submissions. That tells you far more than session count alone, because it shows the page’s actual job getting done or not getting done.
When something changes, an ad campaign launches, a page gets rewritten, events are the first place I look to see whether it moved anything real, before I look at sessions, clicks or any other number further up the chain.
Questions I get about this
- What counts as an event on my site?
- Anything specific enough to matter to the business. A tap on the phone number, a form submission, a click on a booking button, a click to call a location. I set up events around the actions that actually turn a visitor into a lead, not every possible click.
- Do I need Google Tag Manager to track events?
- It helps. Google Tag Manager gives me a way to add and edit event tracking without touching the site's code each time a client wants a new one tracked. It is not the only way to do it, but it is the common one.
- How is an event different from a session?
- A session is the whole visit. Events are the specific things that happened inside it. One session might contain zero events, if someone just reads a page and leaves, or several, if they read a page, tap the phone number and fill out a form.
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.