Counting what visitors do

A counter tells you how many people came. Events tell you what they did: pressed the contact button, downloaded the guide, sent the form. Only how often is counted, never by whom.

1. Mark an element

Add the attribute data-s4u-event to any link or button. Every click on it is counted under that name.

<a href="/contact" data-s4u-event="contact">Contact</a>
<button data-s4u-event="guide-downloaded">Download</button>

2. Or call it from a script

Where there is no click to catch, such as a form that was submitted or a video that reached its end, call the function yourself:

<script>
  s4u.event('form-sent');
</script>

3. Or count every link automatically

Tick “Count link clicks automatically” in the settings of your counter (during setup, or later in the owner box of its statistics page). Each click on a link is then counted under its target, not its link text: pages of your own site by their path, links to other sites by their host. An element that carries data-s4u-event itself is counted once, under the name you gave it.

Rules for names

Names are lowercase and use only a–z, 0–9, hyphen and underscore, at most 32 characters; anything else becomes a hyphen. A counter can hold at most 100 different names. Automatic link clicks may use up to 70 of them, the rest is kept for names you set yourself. Once the limit is reached, existing names keep counting and no new ones are added. One address may send at most 300 events per hour.

What must not be in a name

A name is shown on the public statistics page. Put nothing in it that identifies a person: no name, no e-mail address, no phone number, no order or customer number, no token. Names that contain an @, a long run of digits or a long random-looking code are rejected automatically. A plain name such as “jan-kowalski” cannot be recognised and would be stored, so never build names from what a visitor typed.

What is stored

One row per counter, day and name, with a number behind it. No visitor, no address, no order of clicks. From “contact: 14” it is impossible to tell who clicked.

Where you see it

On the statistics page of your counter, in the section Pages: the card “What visitors did”, with the course over time and, once there is enough data, which events rose or fell compared with the period before.

Several counters on one page

By default an event belongs to the first counter on the page. To choose another one, add its number: data-s4u-id="12345" on the element, or s4u.event('name', '12345') in a script.