The custom events property breakdown feature allows Smartlook users to dive deeper into their website or mobile apps interactions data by breaking them down by additional dimensions.
On its own, expanding events data by additional dimensions results in a comprehensive data set.
And further complemented with Smartlook’s session recordings, it evolves into an amazing insights engine.
For better context and for those just embarking on analytics waters worthwhile to briefly explain the concept of events in analytics.
What are events in analytics?
In analytics, events are all user interactions that can be measured and analyzed.
Google defines events as content interactions measured independently from a web page or a screen load. (Source: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events)
Those interactions could be button clicks, downloads, form inputs, video plays, pop-up windows, scroll depth level and many more.
Event tracking is the core of website analytics and user engagement evaluation. Event analysis is especially useful for the conversion rate optimization, issue (bugs) discovery and user experience design.
How does Smartlook measure events?
Smartlook automatically captures all events and makes their analysis easy and simple.
How events tracking work in Smartlook you can see in the video below:
Smartlook provides users an option to analyze Total versus Unique events. Total events are all recorded interactions, regardless of the number of users. On the other hand, Unique events are all interactions by users with at least one visit to your website or an app.
Additionally, Smartlook allows users to track custom events.
Custom events are all those events that users send to Smartlook via API. These are usually specific and go beyond the basic events (such as clicks or form inputs). With custom events, Smartlook users can get creative and track pretty much anything they want.
And even beyond custom events, Smartlook users can easily send custom event properties via API as well. Properties are variables that contain specific information about the events.
And these custom properties then can be used as dimensions for further data analysis and advanced breakdowns.
I know, it all sounds super complex, worry not, some useful examples follow.
Custom Events Breakdown in Smartlook
Custom Events Breakdown is a powerful analytical feature that allows in depth analyses of any custom events sent to Smartlook.
For example, a mobile game developers can use a custom event – Level Completed – and then break it down by an additional dimension (custom property) – Level Number. The end result would provide the game developer an information on level completion.
With this knowledge the game developers can focus on those levels which have the highest drop rate and further investigate the engagement, by watching their players actually play the game.
Another example of custom events breakdown application would be within e-commerce.
Let’s say you have a global e-shop. Custom events breakdown enable you to watch recordings of those who clicked on your call-to-action or add to cart buttons divided by country, time or even gender of your users. This may ultimately lead you to discover and visualize time or gender specifics that make your users drop-off or convert.
Smartlook with custom events breakdown will provide you with an abundance of answers to your user engagement questions.
And another great thing about this feature—breakdowns can be expanded by further dimensions & evaluated from two different perspectives.
Expanded by two dimensions, with two perspectives
In the demo above you could see how Level Property was added as a dimension to Completed Level.
Beyond that, Smartlook allows the inclusion of one more extra dimension to the event analysis. And the ability to break down events by two properties is comprehensive on its own.
Here’s an example from our own events data set:
In this example, we broke down our pre-defined event — those who clicked on our latest Case Study CTA at some point in past 7 days – by the User type property they’ve picked upon account creation.
For me, in marketing, this information helps me understand our user segments and definitely provides a direction while devising specific content and CTAs. Depending on the goal of the campaign or content, we may either focus on Store Owners for easier conversion path; or cater to UX designers to boost their conversion number in general.
Now, expanded by another dimension — our Smartlook Package Type, the evaluated Case Study event breakdown would look like this:
The addition of one extra property further expands the data set allowing for a granular and detailed evaluation of our visitor types based on their current package.
And the cool thing about Smartlook is that it provides users different perspectives to digest all this information. Either to analyze the events in its combined, quantitative form or go beyond that and watch recordings of those eventful users interactions.
Furthermore, Smartlook users can use the custom events and custom properties to create filters and segments for future references and even easier evaluation.
And it is this interconnectedness of features which makes Smartlook an analytical powerhouse.
Conclusion
Tracking events and user interactions is the only way to really understand user engagement and behavior on your website or mobile app.
Smartlook analytics engine automatically captures all events delivers instant answers to all your user behavior questions.
Recently, we added a new feature — custom events breakdown by 2 dimensions, custom properties. This significantly expands Smartlook’s existing analytics capabilities. Merged with Smartlook’s session recordings, custom events breakdown enables advanced event analysis, segmentation and visualization of user’s engagement.
Check out Smartlook and custom events breakdown for free here.
