: Tie multiple values to an event in Google Analytics I have a search form with several fields - 1 or all of them may be used. I also have an outbound link on the search results that trigger

@Hamaas447

Event parameters are plain text, so you can set whatever you want. Just keep in mind you must follow a convention (defined by yourself) for what you concatenate and how you sort that data, this way your data will be consistent.

The way you want to view your data in Events Report can be accomplished only if you set every single search criteria into one of the parameters of an event and fire an event for each one. As I said before, you can set whatever you want in your parameters, but it's better to stay close to convention, so, maybe the parameter that best fits for this is Label. The simplest thing to do could be something like this:

_trackEvent('whatever-category', 'whatever-action', 'smith');
_trackEvent('whatever-category', 'whatever-action', 'john');
_trackEvent('whatever-category', 'whatever-action', '90210');


Asynchronous version:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'whatever-category', 'whatever-action', 'smith']);


Universal Analytics version:

ga('send', 'event', 'whatever-category', 'whatever-action', 'smith');


In your current implementation, supposing you are already using Category, Action, Label, maybe you have something like this:

_trackEvent('outboundlink', 'click', 'url-clicked-by-visitor');


Trying to add something else to any of these parameters will result in data split, and I think that's not a good idea.

Abusing a little bit of event parameters you could track every search criteria and relate it to the outbound link clicked:

_trackEvent('outboundlink', 'click', 'url-clicked-by-visitor');
_trackEvent('searchcriteria', 'url-clicked-by-visitor', 'smith');
_trackEvent('searchcriteria', 'url-clicked-by-visitor', 'john');
_trackEvent('searchcriteria', 'url-clicked-by-visitor', '90210');


Because URL's will be too many, I'll prefer to set them as Action, and set just one Category for keeping all of them grouped. Also you could set your search criteria as Action and URL as Label.

Parameter Action should indicate some kind of user interaction, but, I guess it's up to the webmaster set whatever makes sense. Anyway, this is not a best practice, but it'll work.

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