Most people begin event tracking with whatever is visible: button clicks, scroll depth, file downloads. Open the report a few months later and you find rows named btn_click_3 and cta_top_new2, and nobody remembers what they were.
The problem is not the volume of tracking, it is the naming. Name an event after the appearance of a page and the data expires the moment that page changes. Sites always change, so this is not a risk — it is a certainty.
The name decides how long the data lives
What the right-hand names share is that they are written in the language of the business. A redesign can move the button, recolour it and rewrite the label, and “someone submitted an enquiry” remains true — which means you can read across the redesign in one continuous line. That, in practice, is what a naming rule buys you.
Deciding what deserves an event
You do not need to record every interaction. Reuse the question from the first part: if this event rose or fell, what would you do differently? Keep the ones with an answer.
Recording less has side benefits: fewer events mean less code running in the browser and less personal data to account for later.
Agree the naming convention up front
Simple conventions are the ones that survive. Lower case, underscores, object then past-tense verb is enough — enquiry_submitted, pricing_viewed. Add two rules to that.
First, the same action gets the same name wherever it happens. Give the hero form and the footer form different names and every “total enquiries” figure becomes an addition you have to remember to do — and one day you will forget. Location belongs in a parameter, not in the name.
Second, keep the list of names in one shared table: name, meaning, when it fires. Without that table, six months later somebody adds a near-duplicate, and from then on two names split the same reality between them.
Always verify after you wire it up
Once configured, perform the action yourself and confirm it is recorded. Enquiry forms deserve particular care: many navigate away on submit, and the page can change before the event is sent, dropping the record entirely. That failure is dangerous precisely because the report does not show zero conversions — it shows slightly fewer than reality.
More on connecting measurement to improvement is in the SEO archive, and what we measure, in what order, when we work on a site is published step by step on the process page.
Next part
With events that carry meaning, the next job is putting them in order. The following part is funnels — dividing the path into steps is what lets you see where people leave.