Advanced Google Analytics Features: Event Tracking, User ID, and Attribution Modelling

Advanced Google Analytics features like Event Tracking, User ID, and Attribution Modelling enable detailed insights into user behaviour, identity, and conversion paths.

Event Tracking

Event Tracking allows you to monitor specific user interactions beyond pageviews, such as clicks, video plays, downloads, or form submissions. In Universal Analytics, events are sent with parameters like eventCategory, eventAction, and eventLabel using JavaScript or Google Tag Manager (GTM). For example:

ga('send', 'event', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Product Demo Video');

Events can be set as interaction (affecting bounce rate) or non-interaction (not affecting bounce rate). GTM is the preferred method for scalable, flexible event tracking implementation, allowing dynamic triggers and tags without hardcoding.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), event tracking is more flexible with event parameters that provide additional context. GA4 supports:

• Automatically collected parameters (default)
• Custom parameters (user-defined)
• User properties (attributes describing users)

GA4 also allows event modification and creation directly in the interface, enhancing adaptability.

User ID

The User ID feature enables tracking individual users across devices and sessions by assigning a unique identifier. This helps unify user behaviour data, providing a more accurate picture of user journeys and lifetime value. User ID requires implementation on your site/app to send the ID with hits, which GA then uses to stitch sessions together.

Attribution Modelling

Attribution modelling in Google Analytics assigns credit to marketing touchpoints that lead to conversions. GA4 supports multiple models, including:

• Last-click attribution (default for user- and session-scoped dimensions)
• Data-driven attribution (default for event-scoped dimensions, uses machine learning to assign credit)
• Other configurable models like first-click, linear, time decay, and position-based

User-scoped dimensions (e.g., First User Source/Medium) use last-click attribution, showing the first method users found your site. Event-scoped dimensions allow configurable attribution models, enabling nuanced analysis of conversion paths.

These features combined allow advanced tracking of user interactions, identity resolution across devices, and sophisticated credit assignment to marketing efforts, empowering data-driven optimisation of digital strategies.