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.

Blog

Why you should collect events from day one

Blog

Five reasons to add events

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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.

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Which events should you send?

To capture different user behavior, send different event types. For a starting point, see Plan your implementation.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

Guide

Shopify

Guide

Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source

Guide

Salesforce B2C Commerce
If you’re using a headless ecommerce platform, see Send click and conversion events from your frontend.

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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.

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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

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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.