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I have been using the trackEvent function of Google Analytics to track how many people are clicking on my external links/banners.

Recently I noticed some events that show up as such in the Real time Events feature of Google Analytics but they give no details on which event they are. Normally it states the name of each event triggered, eg. I call my Banner events "banners" and when someone clicks on those, it says "banners" on the Real Time Event window.

Now interestingly enough, those unidentified events I see, do not score as banner clicks or any other type of events (neither in real time nor in any other analytics report) I have and I am not able to find out what is being triggered by the user.

Normally I wouldn't care but if there is the possibility of some malformed code that prevents my banner ads from "scored as valid clicks" / conversions, I should find out and fix it.

Otherwise, where do those events come from? Any idea that would help me to find out?

(I already looked into the source code of the most visited pages to see if the trackevent code was inserted correctly, and everything seems fine, I also clicked on almost every banner link myself to see if they work or not, just to leave out that option, so it must be something else).

Has anyone experienced this before?

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    I know you said you checked the tracking yourself but have you checked EVERY banner? Maybe there is one that has some faulty tracking code. Have you tried using a debugger to see what gets passed back to your GA Account (chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-debugger/…)
    – dasickle
    Sep 25, 2014 at 17:48
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    I'll look into that once again since it seems the only reasonable solution for now, will update if I find out anything, thanks for the link
    – Leftorro
    Sep 25, 2014 at 21:48

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Use the list of events in the realtime report. It will tell you what each and every event actually is. You can access it with the "view" link on the realtime events report:

view real time events in Google Analytics

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  • Yeah that is exactly what I do, but it is displaying simply nothing.
    – Leftorro
    Sep 24, 2014 at 22:37
  • All of my events show up in that report.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Sep 25, 2014 at 16:57
  • yeah I guess they should, but not for me unfortunately :(
    – Leftorro
    Sep 25, 2014 at 21:47
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Take a look at the Top Events report in Google Analytics. Add Page as a secondary dimension and that might help you figure out where those unknown events are coming from.

Furthermore, it's possible that Google Analytics event tracking might be integrated with some of the functionality of the web page. In other words, the event tracking code might be added inside external .js files that the page requires in order to function normally. If that's the case, then you need to search those external files in order to find out where exactly the event tracking code is invoked.

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