Feature Guide

Auto-Tracked Events

Four kinds of visitor actions, tracked automatically with zero code changes.

Page views tell you which pages people open — but the most useful signals are often the actions in between: the menu PDF someone downloaded, the broken link they hit, the search box they typed into. Crafty Meerkat’s tracking snippet captures four kinds of these events automatically, with no code changes, so you get the answers without hiring a developer.

The four auto-tracked events are: outbound link clicks (which external sites you send visitors to — your Instagram, a booking partner, a supplier), file downloads (PDFs, zips, spreadsheets, media, and more), 404 page hits (dead links your visitors are actually hitting, detected from the page title so you can fix them fast), and internal site searches (the exact terms people type into your site’s search box, read from common query parameters like ?q= and ?s=).

Everything appears in the Events card on your Analytics page, alongside any custom events you send yourself. Top site-search terms get their own list — a direct window into what visitors want but can’t find. If five people searched “gluten free” on your bakery site this week and you have no gluten-free page, that’s next week’s highest-value task, handed to you for free.

How it works

The same under-2KB snippet that records page views also listens for these four actions in the visitor’s browser. A click on a link that leaves your domain becomes an outbound-click event; a click on a file link becomes a download event; a page whose title indicates a “not found” error becomes a 404 event; and a page URL carrying a search parameter becomes a site-search event with the search term attached. No personal data is involved — just the action and the page it happened on.

Step by step

1
Install the snippet — that’s the whole setup
Auto-tracked events start flowing the moment the standard tracking snippet is on your site. There is no toggle to switch on.
2
Open the Events card on your Analytics page
Outbound clicks, downloads, 404 hits, and site searches appear alongside any custom events, with counts for your selected date range.
3
Review the top site-search terms list
These are your visitors’ own words for what they’re looking for. Terms with no matching page are content ideas; terms with a matching page that’s hard to find are navigation fixes.
4
Act on 404 hits and downloads
Fix or redirect the pages behind your 404 events, and note which downloads are popular — a heavily downloaded price list might deserve a proper web page.

Tips from the den

◆Check 404 events after any site redesign or page rename — they surface the dead links your visitors find before you do.
◆Outbound clicks show which partners and social profiles your site actually feeds. If a link gets zero clicks month after month, reclaim that space for something that earns it.
◆Site-search terms are pre-written keyword research: they tell you, in your customers’ own words, what content to create next.

See it live — no signup

The demo dashboard runs on a real site with real traffic.

Open the live demo →

Common questions

Do I need to add any code for auto-tracked events?

No. All four event types — outbound clicks, downloads, 404 hits, and site searches — are captured by the standard tracking snippet on every plan. Custom events beyond these four take one line of JavaScript.

How does 404 tracking work if I never added anything to my error page?

Crafty Meerkat detects “not found” pages from the page title, so as long as your error page includes the snippet (it does if the snippet is site-wide), 404 hits are recorded automatically.

My site search uses a different URL format — will searches still be tracked?

Searches are read from common query parameters like ?q= and ?s=, which covers most platforms including WordPress. If your search uses an unusual format, you can still capture it precisely with a custom event.