Step 3 - Recording Your First Kissmetrics Event with Our JavaScript

Method 1. Using the Event Wizard
- Exercise (Event Wizard)
- Takeaways (Event Wizard)
Method 2. Using the JavaScript API to record
Testing Your Installation
- Exercise (record with the API)
Takeaways

With the JavaScript Library on your website, you’re ready to create the custom events you need. This can be done in one of two ways:

Using the Event Wizard: no experience with code required.
Using API methods: needs moderate experience with JavaScript, but gives more control over when to trigger events and what to name them.

Method 1. Using the Event Wizard

Exercise (Event Wizard)

Practice creating events for visits to important pages, like a signup page or a subscribe page.

Takeaways (Event Wizard)

Works well when you cannot write JavaScript, or cannot make frequent code changes.
Works when the JS snippet is on the pages you want to track.
However, it’s less flexible than invoking the API. You are manually naming each event, and cannot use regular expressions for URL patterns.
When you add a new rule, it may take up to an hour for your browser’s cache to retrieve the updated rules.
The Event Wizard also lets you create events for tracking clicks and form submissions. You’ll need a small amount of knowledge in reading HTML, which we’ll demonstrate in the videos linked.

Method 2. Using the JavaScript API to `record`

See two examples at https://gist.github.com/eskfung/6767787, which is taken from the page source of the page you’re currently reading.

Testing Your Installation

There are a couple of ways to test that you did this correctly - using the Live tab in our app, or if you’re more technical, using your browser’s developer tools. See our guide on Testing: How to Verify Kissmetrics Is Working

Exercise (`record` with the API)

Practice creating events for visits to important pages, like a signup page or a subscribe page.

_kmq.push(['record', A_STRING_WITH_YOUR_EVENT_NAME]);

Takeaways

An event occurs when the JS _kmq.push(['record', SOME_EVENT_NAME]); is executed.
You can bind our API call to JavaScript events, which does not limit you to recording events for each page load. See how we combine record with video player APIs from YouTube and Wistia.
Within the JS library, there are specialized JS functions to help record events upon actions like clicking a page element, submitting a form, or clicking a link that leads off of your domain. Once you are comfortable with using record read more about the functions specific to our JavaScript library.
You can dynamically name events with string interpolation, but remember that events should reflect a conversion important to you. We will encounter performance problems if you record too many event names (say, if you record an event with a unique event name for every page visited).

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