Events: Track clicks, page views, and other visitor actions

  • Updated
  • Optimizely Web Experimentation
  • Optimizely Personalization
  • Optimizely Performance Edge
  • Optimizely Feature Experimentation
  • Optimizely Full Stack (Legacy)

Events

Events in Optimizely experiments and campaigns let you track visitors' actions, such as clicks, page views, form submissions, and purchases.

For example, you might set up a click event to track clicks on a "Contact Sales" button on your homepage or application. Or, you might set up a custom event to track revenue through your checkout flow.

If you use Optimizely to test on a checkout page, you might need to configure your site for PCI compliance.

Events are reusable, so you can add them to any campaign or experiment you build.

Types of Events

Optimizely Web Experimentation and Optimizely Personalization

You can build the following types of events:

  • Click events – Capture visitor clicks on elements like buttons or offers. You create click events on a page, and they inherit URL targeting from that page.

  • Custom events – Capture additional information using custom code. You can use custom events to track behaviors like watching a video, submitting a form, browsing 6 images in a photo carousel, and other actions not reflected in clicks.

  • Pageview events – Tracked automatically for each page that you set up.

Optimizely Feature Experimentation

In Optimizely Feature Experimentation, you can track any type of user event from your application. First, create an event tag string in the Optimizely Feature Experimentation application. Then, use the track() method from the Optimizely Feature Experimentation SDK and pass in the key for the event you created.

Learn how to implement the track() event method in Optimizely Feature Experimentation:

How events are calculated

Events can be used across projects and products. This means you can set up an event in Optimizely Web Experimentation and then track it in both Web Experimentation and Feature Experimentation. This lets you create an event once and reuse it across your entire Experimentation suite. 

After you add an event to a campaign or experiment, it is called a metric. Metrics are displayed on your results page and help you measure differences in visitor behavior based on changes you make to your site in a variation in an experiment or personalized experience.

In Optimizely Web Experimentation, Optimizely Performance Edge, and Optimizely Personalization, events are always on. An event begins tracking data when you set it up. If you add it as a metric to a running experiment, the data for the event is added retroactively, from the date you created the event or the date you published the experiment, whichever is more recent.

An important part of good experiment design is choosing the right events to track. For information on balancing macro conversions, like revenue, with micro conversions to design an effective experiment, see Track macro and micro-conversion events.

Track an event across origins in Optimizely Web Experimentation and Optimizely Personalization

Sometimes, you may want to track events across different origins. For example, you might want metrics that measure actions on http://shop.example.com and http://example.com. These are different origins, so you must set up cross-origin targeting in your Optimizely snippet. Otherwise, you will not see any data for cross-origin metrics on your results page.

Events in Optimizely Personalization

Use events in Optimizely Personalization to behaviorally target campaigns and deliver personalized experiences.

Events are always on. They constantly gather information on the behaviors you identified, even if you have not created a campaign or connected events with an existing campaign. This is useful when you use Optimizely Personalization.

If you use Optimizely Personalization, always-on events help create audiences based on behavior. For example, you can target visitors who triggered a certain event over a certain time period, such as “People who searched 2+ times in the last 30 days.” You can also target more specific behaviors with tags.