How to Track Customer Clicks on your Website

While working on our group project I quickly realized I didn't understand how to read Google Analytics. It showed that all the data was right there, and readily available to me. The problem was that I had no idea how to interpret it. There was a lot of data in front of me, and I had a lot of questions that I was pretty sure that data should help me answer. Connecting the dots was very obviously the hard part for me. Here are some steps that I have since found to help me interpret data from Google Analytics in reference to specifically tracking customer clicks.

One of the main pages the main things that I was struggling to find was how many people clicked on specific links. The first way I found to track this was through using In-Page Analytics. You get to it through the Standard Reporting tab on Google Analytics, and it is under Content. Once you get to it they make it sound like it is extremely straight forward, but after struggling with using if for a little while I’ve found that it is not.

Here is the link to the Google Analytics page that describes how to use In-Page viewing. If everything is set up correctly and your website isn’t to complicated then this works great, and you can easily view how many customers on clicking on what links.

The problem was that my website did not fit under this category. You should be able to click on different parts of your site and from there the top bar changes to match the data for that particular link. Below is what it is supposed to look like once you click on In-Page view.

Another problem that I was facing was the website we were looking at had three different links to its blog on its website, and I wanted to know what links were the most useful and what link wasn’t being used. Here is how to do that in Google Analytics. This was super informative for me and better allowed me to give specific recommendations for the website that I was looking at.

Here is the best tutorial I could find on tracking clicks in Google analytics. If the Google Analytics In-Page did not work for you then this is a more complicated but easy to follow tutorial on how to track customer clicks. I could reiterate this post says but I think it will be easier to follow it Here. If you are interested in not only tracking clicks, but understanding how your clicks are being tracked then click Here. This post gives you a link to understand the technology Google uses to track clicks, a basic implementation post, and a more advanced implementation post. All three were very useful for me to learn how to follow and understand user clicks.

The last way that I am going to mention is you can track clicks through Event Tracking in Google Analytics or by setting up goals. Setting up a goal in Google Analytics for following clicks on a specific link is useful when you want to track specific information with out tracking any other information. It is useful when you have a specific focus that you are looking to accomplish. Here is a blog that does a great job of explaining tracking clicks through event tracking. 

References:

Google Analytics, Content. About In-Page Analytics. http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2558811

Google Analytics. Enhanced Link Attribution. http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2558867

Analytics Talk. Tracking clicks with Google Analytics Pt. 0.

http://cutroni.com/blog/2007/03/23/tracking-clicks-with-ga-pt-2-basic-implementation/

Koozai. How to track clicks on a link in Google Analytics. By Anna Lewis. http://cutroni.com/blog/2007/03/23/tracking-clicks-with-ga-pt-2-basic-implementation/)