With events, you can measure anything about your customers’ behaviors in the session. They let you record that something happened on your site or app. Thanks to events, you will for example learn:
- whether customers were successful after a failed search
- how many customers clicked the Buy button after entering an invalid promo code
- which email people arrived from or which A/B test was running (to show different heatmaps
- what people are struggling with enough to cause abandonment
Let us talk you through a couple of event-related topics you should be familiar with before you start creating your first event.
How events work and when they run
Events can use behaviors from user interactions or from content on the page. They record a value so that one event can be a condition for another event. They record dimensions so that you can plot them in graphs and drill down by different aspects.
Tealeaf runs its engine to look for events while the data is flowing in during the session.
Events can be triggered while the data is coming in, or after the session has finished.
What data events look within
Tealeaf uses two main types of data, that is:
- user interactions like clicks, value changes, or loading a page - these are called steps
- the content of the pages e.g. error messages, or cart totals - we call them hits
Step and hit attributes
To know where to look in the data, Tealeaf uses attributes. These are references to what part of the data Tealeaf should look at.
A step attribute defines which field in the interaction data a condition should use e.g. the click target, hover duration, or changed value.
A hit attribute defines what pattern to look for in a page e.g. the error text, or the HTML surrounding the cart value.
Some step attributes you will use all the time, for example:
- Step - Target ID for the id of the field changed or clicked
- Step - Event Type for if the interaction is a click or a change
- Step - ScreenView Type for if the interaction is a page load
Hit attributes are usually unique for your site and often used in one event, for instance, promo code error message.
Session attributes
You can record information about a session as session attributes. These could be things like:
- the user login id
- the cart/quote amount
- the delivery preference
You put a value into a session attribute by populating it from an event value or another attribute. Session attributes can be used as display columns in a list of sessions, or criteria for other events.
Building blocks
You can analyze complex behaviors by breaking them down into smaller observations. Events can use other events as conditions and values.
- Create one event to measure failed searches.
- Create a separate event to measure successful searches.
- A third event can look for success existing after failure to understand search usefulness better.
Events that are not used in searches or reports directly are called building block events.
When you create a new event it defaults to being a building block event.
Dimensions
When you create an event, you can graph the count of the number of times the event occurred over a time period.
If you want to segment further, or graph by a segment that is not a time period, you need to use dimensions.
Dimensions are ways to record a value for reporting. They can group data into buckets for better analysis.
Dimensions are added to events in dimension groups.
What's next?
Now that you are familiar with these important event-related topics, consider enrolling in our Acoustic Academy course, Event Manager Fundamentals. In this course you will:
- Review the individual components of events and learn how to configure them
- Understand how a session is structured and how events are triggered during a session
- Learn how to navigate the Event Manager interface in Tealeaf SaaS
Simply login using your Acoustic ID, and let the learning begin!