Get started with click and conversion events
Unlock Algolia’s most powerful features by collecting user events with the Insights API.
Events are actions that users take on your app or website. They unlock powerful features, such as recommendations, personalization, smarter search results, and analytics that help you optimize your user experience. With the Insights API, you can capture all important events related to your search and discovery experience.
Explore related videos in the Algolia Academy
Send events
Events enable these features:
- NeuralSearch
- Algolia Recommend
- Personalization
- Dynamic Re-Ranking
- Query Categorization
- Search analytics
- Revenue analytics
- A/B testing.
What are events?
Events represent user interactions with your app or website. They have extra details, like the name, type, and time of the interaction, and user identity.
For more information, see the Insights API reference.
Which events should you send?
To capture different user behavior, send different event types.
For a starting point, see Plan your implementation.
Start your implementation
The best way to send events to Algolia depends on where you’re sending them from. Algolia provides tools to help you make sure your events have all the necessary details.
Client-side versus server-side events
It’s best to send events straight from your users’ devices. To do this, see Send events from your frontend on this page.
If you’re not collecting enough events compared to the number of visitors to your website or app, it might be because your users use ad blockers. In this case, consider server-side tracking.
With server-side tracking, your users send events sent to your servers. Then your servers forward the events to the Insights API. To set up server-side tracking, see Send events from your backend on this page.
Upload events from external analytics
You can speed up data collection by uploading events from the last four days. To upload historical events, use the Send events method.
For Algolia Recommend, you can upload a CSV file with events from the last 90 days.
If an event needs a queryID,
its timestamp must be within an hour of the related search or browse request.
The queryID can’t be from a search event older than four days.
For more information, see Event types.
Send click and conversion events from your ecommerce platform
If you’re using any of these ecommerce platforms, you can use the Algolia integrations to send events:
If you’re using a headless ecommerce platform, see Send click and conversion events from your frontend.
Send click and conversion events from your frontend
If you’re using Algolia’s UI libraries, you can use their Insights integrations to send events:
Guide
InstantSearch.js
Guide
React InstantSearch
Guide
Vue InstantSearch
Guide
InstantSearch Android
Guide
InstantSearch iOS
Guide
Flutter Helper
Guide
Autocomplete
To send events from pages that aren’t search pages,
such as a shopping cart, use the search-insights library for web apps,
and the Kotlin and Swift API clients for native Android and iOS apps.
If you’re not using Algolia’s UI libraries,
use the search-insights library to send click and conversion events.
Collect click and conversion events with customer data platforms or tag managers
These dara platforms can send events to the Algolia Insights API:
Guide
Segment
Guide
Google Analytics BigQuery Export
Guide
Google Tag Manager
Guide
Tealium
mParticle docs
mParticle
Rudderstack docs
Rudderstack
Send click and conversion events from your backend
The Algolia API clients provide methods for sending events to the Insights API. You can also use the API clients to send events in batches or upload events from external analytics.
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