Google Analytics: Count how many times specific event is fired per session

Question

Long question short

How to measure in how many sessions the event in category x with label y is fired more than once?

Long question long

When the user clicks on a specific link on my website, I first show him a popup to ask him to confirm his action (in reality the situation is slightly more complex, but for the sake of a short question I won't elaborate on this now). There is also another button that closes the popup and does not confirm his action.

I want to measure how many users click a "close" button more than once per session, because this is the discouraged action and I would like to know if there's something I should do to discourage people from clicking that button (which is only if there are many users that click it more than once per session).

I have found that I can make a segment that includes the "closes popup" event (category "popup" label "close"), but this does not include the number of times it happens per session. I can also count the number of total events, or even number of total unique events per session, but that still doesn't give me the insight I need.

Is there anyone that could help me set this up?

Answer 1

A Sequence Segment will let you isolate sessions in which your click event occurred at least twice.

After clicking All Users to bring up the segment panel, and then + New Segment to bring up the segment builder, select Sequences under the Advanced options in the left pane. Set Step 1 to your click event, Add Step, and set Step 2 to your click event also.

For the remaining settings, the default values should be correct already: Include Sessions, Sequence Start of "Any user interaction", and Step 1 "is followed by" Step 2 (rather than "is immediately followed by").

I do not believe there's any way to get number of occurrences per session out of GA without essentially having put it into GA in the first place, but Total Events / Sessions will give you an average. If the average is high, segments for "at least 3 occurrences" and "at least 4 occurrences" can help you see whether a high average is due to a lot of people clicking more times ("as least 3" is not much smaller than "at least 2", etc), or a few people clicking a huge number of times ("at least 3" is a lot smaller than "at least 2").

Answer 2

If you are using the javascript confirm method, you can include ajax code there to save the number of times a user is hitting no (and yes if you'd like). If you are using a custom JS popup, you can write it a similar way

var r = confirm("Are you sure you want to leave?");
if (r == true) {
    //whatever you want to do
} else if (r == false) {
    // ajax post to store a "no"
}

---

EDIT WITH GA

You can track the button click in GA with a data push, or if you have GTM you can set it up as an event on the GTM side. With GA, you can take the above code and do a similar thing:

var r = confirm("Are you sure you want to leave?");
if (r == true) {
    //whatever you want to do
} else if (r == false) {
    // report to GA as a "cancelled" click
    dataLayer.push({'event' : 'eventClickTrigger', 'eventCategory' : 'Page Leave', 'eventAction' : 'Cancelled', 'eventLabel' : 'Page Leave'});
}

If you have GTM, it may be easier just to track the cancelled button if it has a class or some other identifier.

There is a good walk through here so I wont copy and paste all their stuff: https://mediacause.org/track-button-clicks-google-tag-manager/

Answer 3

There are many ways to view this data. Try Going to Google Analytics, Click Behavior, Click Events, which is a subcategory of Behavior.

Now, to segment your data, chose one of the several options available to you within Google Analytics. If you followed my steps, you should be able to answer your question, see image below:

Answer 4

You can achieve this with Event Flow report in Behavior>Events>Event Flow.

You can even choose the level of detail to label (your requirement).

You can also see the number of sessions or users in each step to determine the drop off from event to event. Event label to Event label in your case

Relevant snippet from Official guide to Event Flow

For example, all Events in the first column of the flow represent any Event that users triggered before other Events. Events in the second column were triggered second, and so on through the report. Events triggered most frequently appear closer to the top of each column and those triggered less often appear towards the bottom.