Click analytics is a special type of web analytics that is click-oriented and constitutes the first stage in the conversion funnel. Click analytics is useful for the analysis of web activity, marketing, software testing, market research and analyzing employee productivity. That is, click analytics serves fundamentally to help improve the website and show website owners what their site visitors are doing. There are several tools to analyze and monitor the behaviour of users from the sequences of clicks made by visitors to a website.
Click analytics is possible thanks to the practice of clickstream, which consists of recording the interaction of users with a specific web page. The clickstream is a set of requests to a page that generate a signal that can be represented graphically. Afterwards, this collected data may be stored for processing and subsequent analysis of clicks.
The Basic Concept Behind Click Analytics
Previously, click logging was done using server log files. Later Javascript technology was developed and tracking cookies were created to generate signals from browsers, that is, the information collected was a record of where “real humans” clicked through the same browsers.
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Typically, click analytics focuses on on-site analytics. Website owners can use click analytics to determine design, starting from the places where users click. Click analytics can also be used to improve customer satisfaction with the website and with the company itself. This can generate a business advantage and is used to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising on a web page or site. In addition, analyzing the data of customers who visit a web page, can serve to generate results for the company, through an analysis of clicks of a user during the use of a website to reveal patterns of use, which in turn gives a greater understanding of customer behaviour. This use of analytics creates a user profile that helps in understanding the types of people who visit a company’s website. Click analysis can be used to predict whether a customer is likely to purchase from an e-commerce site.
Click analytics may or may not occur in real-time, depending on the type of information you want to search for. Publishers of high-traffic media websites want to monitor their pages in real-time to optimize content. Editors, designers, and other types of stakeholders can analyze clicks in a broader time frame to help evaluate writers’ performance, design or advertising elements, etc. Ideally, a click is “logged” when it occurs, and this method requires some functionalities that collect relevant information when an event occurs.
Measurement techniques (based on labels) do not allow tracking eye movement or, outside of specific initiatives (from screen coordinates), mouse movements. But they do allow us to make a report of hot zones from the clicks made by the user on the links provided during the navigation process, as well as weigh the influence of different actions on the final results.
Drawbacks of Click Analytics
However, click analytics can lead to certain privacy issues, as some Internet service providers have turned to sell users’ browsing data as a way to increase their revenue. Users are often unaware of this fact, even though specific users can often be identified indirectly, and few Internet service providers admit to performing this practice.
Unauthorized click data collection is considered spyware. However, the collection of this data in an authoritative way comes from organizations that generate market research from panellists who agree to share their browsing data with other companies, downloading or installing specialized click collection agents.
