Create an Interaction Event

Interaction events can be based on these types of actions customers take on your site:

  • Click: Track when customers click a specific element, such as a banner, image, or link, on your site
  • Form Submit: Track when customers successfully as well as unsuccessfully submit a form, such as a newsletter sign-up or search query
  • Exit Link: Track when customers click a link that redirects them to an external site, such as your company's page on a social media platform, or any page on which the Monetate tag isn't present
  • Generic: Track other types of customer interactions, such as touch events and mouseovers, using any JavaScript event available in the DOM

For content that the Monetate platform inserts onto your site, click-based interaction events often have a timing issue. Therefore, either use URL parameters on the landing page and tracking their existence with that event type, or code API events into the HTML or JavaScript of the action. See Create API Events for more information.

Because the Form Submit event tracks both the successful and unsuccessful submissions, you may want to add an additional HTML element or URL event to track one versus the other.

If you consider yourself an advanced user, you can use the Generic event type to build an event for any interaction a customer could have with your site that falls outside the first three interaction types. For example, you can build a Generic event to track a mouseover can be used to track how many people hover over your navigation or logo.

Here are some use cases for in-browser JavaScript targets.

navigator.userAgent — Track usage of in-store kiosks or browsers not available in the WHO targets of an experience via their user agent string, for example

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136

document.referrer — Track customers who last viewed a particular URL, for example http://example.com/search/

document.title — Track customers who view a webpage with specific title text as shown in the browser's title bar or in the page's browser tab, for example http://example.com/secret-sale/

Building an Interaction Event

Follow these steps to build an interaction-based event.

  1. Click COMPONENTS in the top navigation bar and then click Events.

    Callout of the Events option in the COMPONENTS menu

  2. Click CREATE EVENT.

    Callout of the CREATE EVENT button on the Events list page

  3. Click the type of interaction-based event that you want to build.

    The Interaction tab of Event Builder, which has four types of interaction-based event options

  4. Use the element selector to choose the element you want to track, and then click the forward arrow.

    If you selected Form Submit or Exit Link in the previous step, then when you place your mouse pointer on any element that's ineligible for the event type that you're building, the ineligible element is highlighted in red and a message about its ineligibility appears in the element selector.

    Callout of the Element Selector field and the forward arrow

  5. If you selected Generic in step 3, then on the Details tab input into Event Type the specific DOM event type you selected for the event you're building.

    Callout of the Event Type field on the Details tab for a Generic-type interaction event

  6. Optionally, configure a condition to limit the event to a specific page type, URL, time, page category, or landing page. Click the Conditions tab, click ADD CONDITION, select a condition category and specific filter option, and then configure the condition equation. Click the forward arrow.

    Callout of the ADD CONDITION selector, with a view of the category options

  7. Type a name for the event into Event Title, type a summary into Description, and then click CREATE & EXIT.

    The final panel of Event Builder, with the Event Title field, the Description field, and the CREATE & EXIT button