Google Analytics Ecommerce Events

A brief reminder: we can track user interactions with content—without relying on web page views or screen recordings—through Google Analytics.

These interactions may include actions such as link clicks, form submissions, file downloads, mobile ad clicks, embedded AJAX elements, and video plays.

In previous posts, I have shared various articles about the Global Site Tag (Global Site Tag / GTAG), which enables us to link our website pages to Google Analytics and Google Ads IDs, and use the data we collect for various purposes. The following list summarizes these posts:

• What is the Global Site Tag (gtag.js)?
• Global Site Tag (gtag.js) Event Handling
• Global Site Tag (gtag.js) Events
• Google Ads – GTM and GTAG Event and Conversion Handling
• Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics Video Events

The above articles generally include examples and additional notes regarding event usage[^1]. In this article, I aim to expand on these examples and provide further explanations for potential scenarios that may arise. Let’s first review event usage through a concrete example;

function onclickCallback(e) {
  var e = window.e || e;
  if ( (e.target.tagName !== 'A') || (e.target.host == window.location.host) ) return;
  outboundLinkClick(e.target); // GA event tracker
}
if (document.addEventListener) { document.addEventListener('click', onclickCallback, false); }
else { document.attachEvent('onclick', onclick_); }

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  $('a[href^="http"]:not([href*="//' + location.host + '"])').on('click', function(e) {
    outboundLinkClick($(this).attr("href")); return true;
  });
});

document.addEventListener('load', function(){
  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('a[href^="http"]:not([href*="//' + location.host + '"])')).forEach(function(e) {
    outboundLinkClick(this.attr("href")); return true;
  });
});

var outboundLinkClick = function(url) {
  // UA
  gtag('event', 'click', {
    'event_category': 'outbound',
    'event_label': url,
    'transport_type': 'beacon',
    'event_callback': function(){
      document.location = url;
    }
  });
}

Considering the anatomy of an event, as clearly shown in the above examples, each event contains components such as category, action, label, and value. Each event parameter includes a corresponding value. The label and value components are optional.