Custom report for event actions/names

Our site has a search suggestion dropdown when typing in the search field. We want to track usage of the search suggestions: text entered triggering the suggestions, suggestions clicked, and search submissions (when suggestions didn’t help).

We’ve set up events for search:
Category: Search
Actions: Show Suggestions, Select Suggestions, and Submit (when suggestions don’t help)
Name: [name of suggestion or submission]

It looks as though the Behavior -> Events report does a pretty good job with the metrics (number of matching events for each action and name). But the report is cumbersome, and it’s a bit clogged with unrelated events we’re tracking.

In trying to create a custom report to mimic the events / actions from the built-in report, I’m not finding any metrics that match. Visits is the closest for relative usage, but visits doesn’t match the total events shown in the built-in report. Is there a metric I’m missing that’d show total events for each action within a category filter?

Hi Mark,

Can you try the metrics “Hits” when creating the custom report?

I found a great solution for this particular report: send a value of ‘1’ for all these events, and measure the total value. That works here because I don’t use value for this particular event.

I’ll try using hits to see how it compares. Thanks for the suggestion. (So glad I can invalidate reports; that’s super-useful!)

Yep, “hits” worked. The hits column in my custom report matches the value column I referenced above in the custom report, and it matches the events column in the built-in report.

Thanks for your help!