Set up events

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  • Optimizely Web Experimentation
  • Optimizely Personalization
  • Optimizely Performance Edge

Events help you measure success in an experiment. They track visitors' actions on your site, such as clicks, pageviews, form submissions, and purchases.

With events, you can track the following visitor behaviors:

  • Click events – Capture visitor clicks on elements like buttons or offers
  • Pageview events – Automatically capture visitor pageviews for each page that you set up
  • Custom events – Capture additional information about other visitor behaviors

Events exist on pages. If you have not set up a page yet, do that first.

For help with the strategy for choosing effective events for your experiment, see Track macro and micro-conversion events.

Set up a click event

Click events capture visitor clicks on elements like buttons or offers. You create them on a page, and they inherit the URL targeting from that page.

  1. Go to Implementation > Pages and select the page where you want to add the event. You can also create a new page.
  2. Go to Events and click Create.
  3. Select Click.
  4. Select the element to which you want to attach a click event.

    The Selector for the element you chose automatically populates. If you prefer, you can enter the element’s selector into the Selector field.

  5. Enter a Name for your event.
  6. (Optional) Add a Description for the click event.
  7. Click Save.
When tracking clicks on links that take visitors to a different origin (for example, from https://www.example.com to https://shop.example.com), certain browser configurations may prevent some events from being persisted and captured. You should track a pageview event on the URL of the click's destination to ensure complete conversion data.

Track multiple selectors

You can track multiple CSS selectors in a click event by comma-separating them. After you have your multiple CSS selectors comma-separated in a list, you can manually add this into the Selector field for an event. After you add them in, if they are found on the current page, they are highlighted in blue in the visual editor.

After saving your new click event, the elements remain highlighted in blue when you open the event, indicating a success.

Now you can track a single event across multiple selectors on your site page.

Set up a click event for a variation

Avoid using this method unless absolutely necessary.

Sometimes, when you create a variation, you use the Visual Editor to insert a new element that does not exist in the original.

Using this feature means:

  • The click events will not be found under Implementation > Events, which means it may be hard to track down which experiment created the click event should you need to check the configuration.
  • These click events are only tracked when the experiment is activated for the visitor and are not tracked otherwise.
  • You cannot target more than one selector or element within these click events without altering the scope of your change.
  • The click event cannot be measured as more than one type of numerator (for example, unique and total conversions).

To avoid these issues, create click events using the method above.

To track clicks for an element that is created in a variation:

  1. Select an experiment or campaign.
  2. Click Variations.
  3. Edit an existing variation or create one.
  4. Click Create beside Changes.
  5. Click Element Change.
  6. Select the element and expand Track Clicks.
  7. Select the Track clicks on this element checkbox.
  8. Enter the click goal Name.
  9. Click Save.

Track clicks within an iframe

To track clicks within an iframe on your page, ensure the Optimizely snippet is implemented on the URL that is being loaded inside the iframe.

If the URL inside the iframe differs from the one on the current page, you also need to include this origin in your cross-origin tracking setup. In situations when the iframe URL lives on a different domain compared to the URL of the current page, you further need to implement the waitForOriginSync() API (on the URL loaded within the iframe) to make sure Optimizely data is synchronized across the two domains before it activates.

Set up a pageview event

Pageview events are added automatically for each page you create, so you do not have to do anything to set them up. To view your pageview events, go to Implementation > Events.

Set up a custom event

Custom events capture additional information using custom code. Use them to track behaviors like watching a video, submitting a form, or other actions not always reflected in clicks or pageviews. See Custom events for information.