Event tracking setup in Usermaven
Event tracking helps you gain valuable insights into how users interact with your website or product. Events are specific user actions you want to track, like signing up for a free trial, downloading a file, clicking a link, or completing a purchase.
Why event tracking matters
- For websites and e-commerce stores: Track conversions, conversion rates, referrer sources, entry pages, and top-performing pages to achieve your goals.
- For SaaS products: Understand user behavior, analyze product usage, and identify areas for improvement by tracking actions users perform in your product.
Usermaven offers a powerful and flexible suite of tools for event tracking. This guide explains our primary methods—auto-capture, pinned events, and custom events—and shows you how to optimize your setup for the most actionable insights.
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Event tracking methods in Usermaven
Usermaven makes event tracking seamless with a combination of automatic and manual methods, giving you full control over your data.
Auto-captured events
By default, Usermaven’s tracking script automatically captures most front-end user interactions on your site. This provides a comprehensive baseline of user activity without requiring manual setup for every element.
What auto-capture tracks:
- Page views (these are always tracked, even if auto-capture is disabled)
- Clicks on most elements (buttons, links, images, icons, headings)
- Changes in input fields, text areas, or dropdowns
- Form submissions
- Events from most pop-ups
Note: For security and privacy, auto-capture does not track events within iframes and automatically excludes sensitive data like passwords. Only the name, id, and class attributes of input fields are captured.
Pinned events
Pinned events are the easiest way to label and highlight the most important user actions that are already being tracked by auto-capture. Think of them as bookmarks for your key events, like signups, purchases, or downloads.
- Individual pinned events: Monitor a specific button or action on a single page.
- Grouped pinned events: Track similar actions across multiple pages, like an “Add to Cart” button that appears on different product pages.
For a step-by-step guide, refer to our article on creating pinned events .
Custom events
Custom events are ideal for advanced use cases that auto-capture can’t handle. They give you precise control by letting you manually send event data to Usermaven using our JavaScript API or backend methods.
Use custom events for tracking:
- Actions that occur inside iframes, like payment forms or embedded videos.
- Events from third-party sites, such as a checkout process completed on another domain.
- Form submissions that don’t lead to a “thank you” page.
- Specific backend actions (e.g., a subscription was successfully created).
To learn more, see our complete custom events guide .
How to manage event volume and costs
While auto-capture is convenient, it can sometimes collect events from noisy or irrelevant parts of your site. This can make analysis difficult and may increase your event volume costs.
To give you full control, Usermaven provides several methods to manage your data collection. You can choose to exclude specific elements (like a navigation bar), disable auto-capture on entire pages (like an admin dashboard), or turn off auto-capture completely to rely on a fully manual tracking setup.
For a complete walkthrough of all exclusion methods, including code examples and best practices, please see our dedicated guide on How to exclude some or all auto-captured events.
Note: Unlike auto-captured events that can be prevented, custom events sent via API or JavaScript methods are permanent and cannot be deleted to lower your event volume. However, you can mute noisy custom events in your custom events list. Muting removes them from reports and analysis tools but does not affect your total event count for billing.