Understanding GA non-interactive events: month 1 insights

Starting a new adventure in analytics

When I first decided to quit my ohh-so-lucrative job in the investment banking, most of my friends and family thought I was going bonkers! Neither were they impressed with my idea to start a new career in Web Analytics, working for some small start-up based in Lewes (wait why exactly do you want to work in Loos?!?). I must say that I had my doubts as well - will I be able to adapt to a totally new working environment? Will I ever learn what all the cookies, crawler, and spiders really mean? And most importantly - will I become a total computer geek???

Month one reflections

One month on and some of these questions have been answered already: I shouldn’t be afraid of spiders; I should only eat low sugar cookies; and working for a start-up is actually quite cool. The rest - TBC.

It’s been an intensive month so far, but I can already see some progress and can’t say that I hate my job yet (which is a good sign)!

Discovering non-interaction events

Let’s have a look at one curious thing I learned recently - Non-Interaction Events.

What are non-interaction events?

OK, that doesn’t sound quite logical - events by nature are users interactions with the content on your site, like clicks on links, submitting forms, downloading PDF, etc. So how can you have events that are non interactive?

When to use non-interaction events

Let’s say that your main page has a video that automatically plays when a user enters the site (happens all the time when I open news articles on some popular news sites). The user is not really interacting with the video as these are set to automatic play, and they can close the site immediately without watching the clip, reading the site content or going to any subsequent pages. In that case, you would like to track that hit as a non-interaction event.

How to set them up

To do so you either set the interaction parameter to “1” in your event data:

or “true” if you are using Google Tag Manager:

Why non-interaction events matter

There is one main reasons why you should set these kind of events to non-interaction hits. The bounce rate! Here is what GA has to say about events : “by default, the event hit is considered an interaction hit, which means it is included in bounce rate calculations”. And we don’t really want that to happen! We want these sessions to be treated as totally 100% bounced so that they don’t mess up our reporting! This is where the non-interaction events come in handy. Knowing this small trick will ensure better accuracy of your data.

Wrapping up and next steps

Check GA support site for more details on non-interaction events and wish me luck with my new job!

By the way, if you’re confused when it comes to bounce rate concept I strongly recommend reading a great article by one of my colleagues, Alex: Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate.