What is an event in analytics?
An event is a recorded action beyond loading a page. Autocapture versus explicit events, properties, naming, and how events become goals and revenue.
What is an event in analytics?
An event is any recorded action beyond loading a page: a button click, a form submitted, a video played, a subscription upgraded. Events carry a name and optional properties describing the specifics, and they are what turns analytics from a traffic report into a record of what people actually did.
Autocapture and explicit events
There are two ways events get recorded, and mature setups use both for different jobs.
Autocapture records interactions automatically without any code: clicks on links, form submissions, outbound navigation. It is immediate, it needs no engineering time, and it is retroactive in tools that store the raw interactions. Its weakness is that the events are described by DOM selectors, so a redesign that changes a class name silently breaks the measurement.
Explicit events are sent by your code with a name you chose. They survive redesigns, they can carry meaningful properties, and they can be fired from the backend where the browser cannot be trusted. They cost engineering time and they only exist from the day someone adds them.
The sensible split: autocapture for exploration and for the long tail of interactions, explicit events for anything you report on, and server-side explicit events for anything involving money.
Properties are where the value is
An event name should describe what happened. Everything variable about it belongs in properties.
The failure mode is encoding variables in the name: report-created-pdf, report-created-csv, report-created-pdf-scheduled. Three events that cannot be totalled, and a fourth appears the moment someone ships a new format. One event named report created, with format and scheduled properties, answers every version of the question and keeps totalling correctly.
Keep properties low cardinality where you can. A property holding a user id or a timestamp creates as many distinct values as there are events, which makes grouping useless and storage expensive. Never put personal data in a property.
See it on real data
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Open the live demoA naming convention worth enforcing
Object then action, past tense
report created, invite sent, subscription upgraded. Consistent word order means an alphabetical list groups itself by object.
One case style, forever
Event names are usually case sensitive. Signup and signup are two events. Pick lowercase and never deviate.
Write the plan down first
A tracking plan listing every event, its properties and its owner is the difference between a catalogue people trust and three hundred events nobody can define.
Fewer than twenty to start
Signup, activation, the core value action, the paid conversion. Add more when a specific question demands it, not in anticipation.
Events, goals and revenue
A goal is just an event you decided matters. Marking an event as a goal is what lets it appear as a conversion rate, as a funnel step, and as an outcome attributed to the campaign that produced it.
Attaching a value turns it into revenue. A purchase event carrying an amount lets the same event stream answer both what converted and what it was worth, which is why marketing and finance numbers stop disagreeing when revenue lives on the event rather than in a separate system.
Mrkr supports events from the browser tracker and from your backend over the HTTP API, with optional properties and an optional revenue value. Events work in the default cookieless mode, since an event belongs to a session rather than to a person tracked across days. Attributing an event to a person over weeks needs your own user id or the optional per-site cookie mode, which requires consent on that site.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the share of visits or visitors that completed a defined goal, such as a signup, a purchase or a demo request.
- What is conversion funnel?
A conversion funnel is an ordered sequence of steps a visitor takes toward a goal, measured by how many people reach each step.
- What is product analytics?
Product analytics is the measurement of what people do inside a product rather than how they arrived at it.
- What is session?
A session is one continuous visit to a site: a group of pageviews and events from the same visitor with no long gap between them.
- What is server-side tracking?
Server-side tracking sends analytics events from your own backend rather than from the visitor's browser.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Send custom events with the Mrkr JavaScript API
Names, properties and revenue values, with examples.
- Send events from your backend so nothing can block them
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
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