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Google Analytics Data Dictionary

Tracking Common User Interactions

As you begin building your product, you may have questions about what interactions are already tracked and what might need to be customized for your product. The Platform Analytics & Insights team looks for ways to ensure common user interactions are tracked globally. This resource outlines common site interactions that should not require further customization by your product team.

How interactions are organized in Google Analytics

Google Analytics defines user interactions as events and uses a hierarchy of Event Category, Event Action, and Event Label. To access event tracking in the Modernized areas of VA.gov, please visit the Top Events report in Google Analytics to see the collected event data.

These are the broad Event Categories you will find in Google Analytics:

  • Interactions: The user clicks on some UI element to interact with our site but does not result in a call to a back-end system (menu click, CTA click, etc.)

  • Transactions: These represent a successful self-service action that is considered a "conversion." These should be the "end goal" actions of each VA.gov product. Using a separate category allows us to take a site-wide picture of transaction volume and trends in a simple manner.

  • Sign-on: The user takes some action related to their profile (logging in, registering, etc.)

  • API Calls: The front-end submits something (a form's content, etc.) on behalf of a user to the VA.gov API but does not represent a successful conversion

  • Internal: For tracking items of interest of the VA.gov team but not directly about external users

  • Error: All client-side (JavaScript) errors are logged in Google Analytics under this category

Design system component interactions

There are several common navigation elements that use the design system components. When these components are used in a page’s design, tracking is automatically enabled. Moving forward, we'll continue building this library with the components and matching Google Analytics navigation elements. These elements will require additional dataLayer code within the front-end.

Tracked Interactions

We track the following interactions in Google Analytics:


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