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

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.

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

You can build the following types of eventsevents:

In Optimizely Feature Experimentation, you can track any type of user eventany type of user event from your application. First, create an event tag stringevent 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:

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.

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 targetingset up cross-origin targeting in your Optimizely snippet. Otherwise, you will not see any data for cross-origin metrics on your results page.

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.