On October 26, 2019, the WordPress community met at MIND México Innovación y Diseño for WordCamp Guadalajara 2019: a full day of talks and conversations about WordPress, from 9:00 to 18:00. I was one of the speakers on the technical track, with a session called Event Tracking con Google Analytics y WordPress. The video is now on WordPress.tv, so here it is with a few notes.
Watch the talk
The talk is in Spanish. You can also download the slides (PDF) or read the session page on the WordCamp site.
Why I chose this topic
Working with a digital marketing agency, I kept seeing the same pattern: campaigns launched with a budget but without metrics to back it. Paid campaigns live on conversions such as calls, forms and WhatsApp messages, and most of those happen on the website. If WordPress doesn’t report them, nobody can tell which ads work.
So the session was practical: what to measure, where to put the code and how to check that every conversion reaches Google Analytics.
What the session covered
- What a conversion is and how to track it in Google Analytics.
- The most common conversions on a business website: calls, emails, WhatsApp messages and forms.
- Adding the Analytics code to WordPress, with or without a plugin.
- Tracking link clicks and Contact Form 7 submissions as events, and turning them into goals.
It was listed as intermediate to advanced, and it had a lot of code. The complete walkthrough, with every snippet, is in Event Tracking with Google Analytics and WordPress.
Who was on stage
This is how I introduced myself that day: front-end web developer, working with CMSs since 2010 (Magento, WordPress, Drupal and CodeIgniter), certified in Google AdWords and Google Analytics, first-dan black belt, blogger, film lover and a geek who follows anime and video games.
Keeping it light
Code-heavy talks need room to breathe, so I split the sections with a few quotes. My favorite: “Se hace lo que se puede con lo que se tiene y, si no, lo que te alcance”, which roughly means “you do what you can with what you have, and if that’s not enough, with whatever you can afford.” It sums up small-business marketing pretty well. The last slide before the questions had my best advice of the day: a few beers, a whisky and a good night’s sleep are your best weapons.
Thank you, Guadalajara
Thanks to the organizers, volunteers and sponsors who make a WordCamp possible, and to everyone who came to the session with questions. You can read more about me and the work I do with WordPress today.
Note from 2026: a few months after this event, the pandemic moved WordCamps online, which makes this pre-pandemic edition a good memory. Universal Analytics, the version shown in the talk, has also been retired; the same ideas now apply to Google Analytics 4.