Sending Custom Event Data to Google Analytics Goals

  • 26 March 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 47 views

Let me say up front, I don’t have much experience with javascript, so this could be the issue. But I am trying to figure out how to make Unbounce work with our existing goals, rather than setting up a whole bunch of separate goals just for Unbounce. I have the GA Script active. But I can’t figure out if there’s a way to change the default value it puts in for events.

So my issue:
We were using a fairly simple form interface on our site for landing pages. But it allowed us to send event data to GA.

Our goals are all set-up like this:

And it’s simple to set up to send this data via a snippet of code attached to the send button the page:
ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Form’, ‘Submit’, ‘ContactUs’);

The script is used across all pages, and seems to use a variable that uses the button submit id? Is there way to override that? Or some other way to do this without setting up new goals just for Unbounce?


3 replies

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Hi Jon!

You’d only need to do this once in GA for all of your Unbounce landing pages, so it should be relatively quick.

You don’t need to include the Label, you can get this working simply with the Category and Action fields so that all your unbounce forms get into that same goal.

Let me know if this helps 🙂

Hi Stefano,

Thanks for the assist. I guess my issue is that (ideally) I’d like to send Unbounce completions to different goals. For instance, we have goals set up for Contact Us, Trial Sign-up, Webinar, E-book, etc. That’s why adjusting that label is kind of critical, because that’s currently how we differentiate the form submission events into different goals.

Jon -

I think the easiest (or, well, “the most direct”) way to solve this problem would be to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) rather than directly connecting Unbounce to Google Analytics (GA).

GTM allow you to quickly and easily load a variety of scripts (a multitude) into one “container” that you put into Unbounce as 1 script that covers all the pages you’d like to track things on (e.g., one container for one full domain, a group of subdomains, etc).

Each script in GTM is called a “tag” and each tag can be fired by one or more “triggers” that listen for various events that occur on your web pages. They can be as broad as “all pages” (for something like a GA pageview, or a Facebook Pixel page view) or as discrete as a click on one single button on one single page (for something like a form submit conversion).

To solve your particular problem:

In GA, what you would do is create a Goal for each different type of conversion - using a distinct “label” descriptor for each one (Contact Us, Trial Sign Up, etc.). It sounds like you might have those goals already.

GTM will allow you to create a “tag” for each of the different types of event you want - e.g., using the same category & action but a different label. Then, you can use individual “triggers” for each of those events.

All of your buttons have a distinct identifier, and that’s what you’ll set your “trigger” to listen for. Suppose you have an Unbounce landing page “example.com/get-some”. On that page you have a button for “Trial Sign Up” - and if you click on the button in your Unbounce editor, and scroll all the way down in the configuration panel, you’ll see it has a unique identifier along the lines of “#lp-pom-button-522”. Another button, say, for “Download E-Book,” would have a different, distinct identifer, e.g., “#lp-pom-button-544”.

What you would do is set up a trigger in GTM that tracks certain clicks, and set the trigger rule to be [click id equals #lp-pom-button-522] + [page url contains /get-some] and then you’d use that trigger to fire a GA Universal event “tag” that sends an event with appropriate category, action and label (“Trial Sign Up”) to GA. You would then set up a trigger for [click id equals #lp-pom-button-544] + [page url contains /get-some] for the tag that sends a similar event to GA, only with the label “E-Book Download” or whatever. Just make sure that the category, action and labels you set on those tags in GTM match exactly with the event criteria in your GA Goals, and you’re good to go!

You can read more about this here:

Install GTM > https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/easy-google-tag-manager/
Button Tracking > https://www.lovesdata.com/blog/google-tag-manager-button-click-tracking
Advanced > https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/track-form-engagement-with-google-tag-manager/

Good luck!

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