Event tracking that measures what advertisers pay for

In a directory business the advertiser buys position and receives calls. Anything that happens between the two is an assumption until someone measures it.

Standard web analytics measures neither position nor calls. It counts sessions, pageviews and bounce rates, which describe the website and say nothing about the value delivered to one advertiser on it. You cannot take a bounce rate to a repair shop and explain why the invoice is what it is.

The taxonomy follows the value chain from position to call, while standard tools are organized by page.

Position as a first-class event. The events top1, top3, top5 and top10 were recorded at the moment a listing appeared instead of being derived afterwards. A premium listing is sold as better placement, so placement has to be demonstrable, and that means recording it when it happens.

I split the chain into stages: position → impression → interest → intent → contact.

Interest was deliberately granular: opening hours, services, amenities, rates and reviews were tracked separately. Each of those is a different question, and a system that lumps them together as "engagement" throws the answer away.

Intent and contact as separate events. Revealing a phone number is recorded as intent, and placing the call as contact. The gap between them is a conversion rate that no general-purpose tool would produce, because none of them knows that revealing a number is the meaningful moment in this business.

Primary, secondary and after-hours numbers. Each was tracked separately. In truck repair the difference matters: a call at three in the morning means a different kind of urgency and a different kind of job.

The sales funnel. I also measured which package a visitor chose and which tier of listing they created. That way the system describes how an advertiser decided what to buy as well as what they receive.

• ~180 event types covering the whole chain from placement to call
• Yearly reports that answer the one question an advertiser has at renewal: how many people saw the listing and how many called
• A conversion rate from number reveal to call, which no off-the-shelf tool would have produced

Over four years the platform tracked 180 event types, and there was never a scheduled review of which ones anyone still looked at. Some certainly stopped being used and kept being written. We had a naming convention for events but no habit of pruning them, and a taxonomy needs both. I would review the event types on a schedule.