Tracking complex events

General questions
1

Hi all,

We use piwik to track user searches (among other things) and they might create a search with a zip code, a keyword, two category choices and click search. They might also just choose “country” and click search. Our users want to see reporting on all of these options (which vary by customer).

Here are some options I’ve considered:

  1. Stack the options in a pipe delimited Event label. E.g. “Search”,“Click”,“Country: United States: Categories(French Fries|Hamburgers|) Keyword: salty”. The issue I see with that is that reporting might become difficult. The other issue is that events can’t be segmented by Page URL, a drawback I’ve posted about here a few times.

  2. Setup custom dimensions for each customer depending on the search options. Some customers have > 3 search options, and we’re already using 2 custom dimensions for core segments so that’s likely not an option.

  3. Try to create segments by Page URL “contains” since the search parameters end up in the Request URL (sometimes). See option #1 for the drawback here since we lose the events since events aren’t reported when you create a segment by Page URL

Thanks!

2

What did you end up doing?

3

Item #1 was the winner here, but we really have yet to test it’s limits with reporting. It works for now. We also created a custom dimension that used an ID variable that was 1 for 1 with Page URL, allowing us to segment the events by page.

4

Thanks :slight_smile: very much appreciated! Trying to figure out if we can avoid
moving to MixPanel, etc. How far we can push the community vers. of PiWik.

5

Events and Custom Dimensions seem to be the secret sauce. Custom dimensions allow you to segment your events, and that’s the magic bullet for us.