Office of Marketing and Communications

GA Site Engagement Events and Goals

Site engagement events and goals help you understand how users interact with elements of your pages and the site overall.

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Type: GA Event / GA Roll-Up Property Goal

  • Use to understand how engaged your users are with your site as indicated by their willingness to visit multiple pages.
  • This goal can be used instead of the Time on Page metric to track actual behavior instead of assumed behaviors.
  • Event Criteria For Developers
  • This event is triggered when a user interacts with any five pages in the same session. There are no additional criteria required.

File Download      

Type: FB Conversion Event / GA Event           

  • Use to count how many sessions included a download of content.
  • Event Criteria For Developers
  • Attach a data attribute to the action button of: data-event-interest=”File Download”
  • To use as a FB Conversion: Attach a data attribute to the action button of: data-event-conversion=”File Download”
  • Event will fire automatically by a click on any of the following file types – csv, doc, docx, dvi, gz, gzip, pdf, pptx, rtf, tar, tgz, txt, xls, xlsx, xml, zip – but will not capture a direct download of a file (i.e. your URL sends a user directly to the PDF in a browser)

Watched Video

Type: GA Event / GA Roll-Up Property Goal

  • Use to understand how many and what kinds of users clicked to play a video.
  • This goal can be used to indicate that a video was of use to the user during their experience.
  • Other information available in the Events report include Play, Pause, Watch to End, and 10/25/50/75/90% video completions.
  • Event Criteria For Developers
  • When a user clicks to play a video that’s been embedded to a page from YouTube or Vimeo, an event is created where category equals "Video" and Event Action equals "Play." This event triggers the goal. There are no additional criteria required.

Social Share

Type: GA Event / GA Roll-Up Property Goal

  • Use to understand how many and what kinds of users are sharing content from your site via social networks or e-mail. Additional event-related data includes platform shared to and content shared.
    • Example: When a user shares a page via social sharing buttons links on your pages.
  • Event Criteria for Developers
  • This rule looks for a click on a link to one of those sources and the text or attribute “share/sharing” on it. This covers most examples of share buttons and functionality. There are no additional criteria required.
  • This event is also triggered when sharing via email links often located next to social sharing buttons. The actual JavaScript piece of this trigger is below.

if (/^mailto:.*?body=.*?http/i.test(el.href)) {// extract the URL (minus query string) or fallback to page we're on.

var url = /[\s\S]*?body=[\s\S]*?(https?:[^ ?&+]+)/gi.exec(decodeURIComponent(el.search));

return url ? url[1] : '{{Page URL}}';

A mailto: share is any mailto: link that has a URL in the contents of the email link body. Mailto: and tel: links are also tracked automatically. Only links with a mailto: or tel: are tracked, so just an email address on the page itself would not be tracked, nor would a bare phone number on the page.

External Link Click

Type: GA Event

  • Use to understand content clicked by page to sites outside of the osu.edu domain. Clicked links can be viewed as Event Labels in Events reporting. On it’s own, an external link click event does not trigger a goal. However, see other goals for when the value of an external link click may trigger a goal (i.e. a click to the Common Application)
  • Event Criteria For Developers
  • By a click on a link to a destination URL outside of the osu.edu domain. There are no additional criteria required.