Event Tracking for LearnDash

What is Event Tracking?

Every time you do something online, you're likely being tracked. Now, that can sound ominous, but it doesn't have to be. If someone is tracking you to sell that behavior to others, that's what I would consider bad. But if you're using event tracking for anonymous personalization, it might be considered both helpful and useful.

The simple nature of event tracking is simply data collection. You saw something. You started something. Something has been completed.

Why is Event Tracking Important?

Event tracking has never been more “center stage” than now, where we're all a little more (or a lot more) careful about our privacy and our private information.

But it doesn't mean, like I said already, that all event tracking is bad.

Imagine I go to Amazon and browse for tennis shoes for my wife. I click on one pair, and then another. And their algorithm realizes that I'm looking for shoes, shoes for women, and shoes in a size 9. Now it can make a recommendation (even if I wasn't logged in and didn't know who I was).

That's exactly what happened this weekend when I was looking for tennis shoes for my wife while on my phone that didn't have my Amazon app installed. I jumped on the website and didn't even realize I wasn't logged in. But my browsing helped them find the right stuff for Melissa and I was happy to make the purchase based on the recommendation.

How Might You Use Event Tracking with LearnDash?

The problem with most event tracking and online learning software is that we use tags. Tags like – “lesson one viewed,” “lesson one started,” “lesson one completed,” and more. Now think about the tons of tags that would exist on a person who has participated in 3 courses, each with 10 lessons.

Now your tags are, “Course One Lesson One Viewed.” Oh man.

And your logic inside most of your automations will be to remove a tag after adding one, simply to keep the tag quantity down. But that will create an issue if you ever forget to add that one little step.

So what you want instead is event tracking. Each of those steps (lesson viewed, lesson started, lesson completed) is an event that can be added to your profile (with a date and time even).

Imagine this scenario – a person buys a course. Fourteen days later, they still haven't started lesson one, or even logged in. Now your automation can look for that event, and if it's not there, send a very encouraging email.

Pretty powerful, right?

Imagine this scenario – a person buys a course and starts it right away. They complete lessons one, two and three. And your automation looks every week to watch the progression but now it's been 2 weeks with no movement on lesson four. Time to send that encouraging email or to check to see if there's anything you can do to help them.

Let's be honest – this is what we want at LearnDash. Badly.

Event Tracking Is On Its Way

And the good news appeared the other day in a facebook group that I'm a part of. My friend Jack, the guy that runs the WP Fusion product, mentioned that they were adding event tracking.

Today I got my hands on the beta and it does exactly what I'm looking for. I can't wait for it to come out. And when it does, it will make so much of what you do so much easier – simply because they're looking at the LearnDash courses and lessons and tracking events.

Watch Out for WP Fusion & Bento

Now, at this point in time, none of the three WordPress CRMs that I mentioned yesterday support it. But Groundhogg is working on it. And I'm sure the others will get there at some point.

But Bento, the one I told you about in my post about anonymous personalization, already supports event tracking and WP Fusion already works with it. So that's the one you should check out sooner rather than later.