11 min read
Google Analytics Click Tracking
The success of any website is usually only possible by accumulating and maintaining a dedicated user base. Understanding what features visitors to your site enjoy and what features display a high degree of popularity is vital for keeping your user base happy with your web services. Similarly, knowing which aspects of your website are often avoided or go unnoticed by users is important for service improvement and allotting resources appropriately. Much of this can be accomplished through acquiring user feedback, although to truly understand how your website is being utilized, you’ll need to look into a website analysis tool. The most popular of these tools is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a highly recommended and very expansive tool which can measure a long list of different interactions users have with websites. In addition to being free, the analytics tool offers a broad range of information such as user demographic data, how many people visit a website, and what devices are being used to search a site. However, one of the main benefits is Google Analytics click tracking. Using a click tracking code, website administrators can see the many different ways in which services, like embedded media players, are used and how frequently individual user interface icons are clicked on.
Analytics click tracking is invaluable as it provides more than just generic user information and instead reveals the specific actions visitors take when looking through a website. It can determine a lot about how well-designed a website is and how efficiently users are able to look through its content. Depending on whether advertising or service offerings are involved, analytics can also reveal ways to maximize revenue.
How Does Google Analytics Work?
Using carefully designed JavaScript code (tracking code) and embedding it in a website’s structure, Google Analytics will be able to place cookies into the browser of site visitors. These cookies will keep track of a wide variety of user information, including:
- Conversion rates
- What devices are used to look at a website
- Which pages are most frequently visited
- See how fast web pages load
- Reveal what people are clicking on an how many times
- Whether marketing strategies are working as intended (attribution)
- What country a visitor is looking a website from
- Which channels are driving the most traffic to a website
- How many people used a website in a given time frame (including real-time visitors)
If you’re a website administrator who wishes to use the service, you will first have to create a Google Analytics account. After an account has been created, you’ll be able to see the many different options available for the analysis of your website. Google Analytics will use the data accumulated through your website’s click tracking code to compile reports which tell you how the site is performing in key areas. Several of these reports are produced by default and are available at the top left-hand corner of the Google Analytics home menu. These commonly referenced reports include:
Conversions: While the usefulness of conversion tracking isn’t particularly high when first doing website analytics, it will eventually prove to be invaluable. The conversion section will typically consist of just a couple of components in the beginning, like Goals and Ecommerce, to figure out a basic website performance. Conversion rates will ultimately determine how well a website’s purpose is being realized as it measures website activities such as whether a video was played, if a link was clicked on, or if a product was purchased. Initial conversion rate analysis options are pretty sparse, but can be very heavily modified to monitor unique website needs. Here is an image showing conversion tracking:
(Image Credit: Intelliwolf)
Behavior:One of the more expansive reports available, the behavior section keeps track of the search behavior displayed by visitors to a website. It accumulates information which determines how many views certain pages get, how many visitors look at a singular page and then leave (bounce rate), how many times visitors leave a certain page, the average time visitors spend on a page, and the number of unique pageviews. For example:
(Image Credit: Social Media Examiner)
Acquisition: Acquisition reports determine by what method visitors end up reaching a site. Google Analytics cookies can see whether a website visitor arrived at a website either through a search engine or through a direct URL search. It can also be reported whether a website was reached through a direct link, including if it’s related to a social media platform. The image below shows an Acquisition Report:
(Image Credit: Social Media Examiner)
Audience: The audience report displays the demographic information of website visitors as well as what kind of devices are being used to look at a website. It’s very useful for understanding the gender and age of most users as well as if a website needs to be optimized for usage with phones. For instance:
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(Image Credit: Search Engine Watch)
Realtime: Shows how many people are currently viewing a website, including which web pages are being looked at. Realtime reports can be augmented to include information like traffic sources and visitor’s countries of origin. For example:
(Image Credit: Search Engine Watch)
While Google Analytics has a lot of options for understanding the ins and outs of website traffic, it’s not always comprehensive or easy to modify, which is why numerous plugins exist to help users facilitate website analysis. These plugins are usually only compatible with WordPress, with the most popular options being:
- Analytify
- MonsterInsights
- GA Google Analytics
- Google Analytics by Web10
- ExactMetrics
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Clicks and Event Tracking
Google Analytics click tracking is oftentimes the best way to discover how to improve your website, either in terms of service improvement or to better cater to the interests of your user base. Google Analytics page click tracking is a common way to determine which pages are popular on your website, although usually the premiere method to figure out how to meet your goals is to see which aspects of the user interface are interacted with most frequently; a process better known as event tracking.
While Google Analytics events aren’t concretely defined, they can be considered to be any situation in which a user interacts with individual elements available on a web page. Participation in flash player content, use of video players, and downloading files are all considered to be events and consist of users manually pressing on UI elements to initiate some sort of action, hence the term click or button tracking.
Button tracking Google Analytics can be succinctly or broadly defined according to your preferences and there are several qualifiers (category, action, label, and value) that can be combined to analyze what kinds of interactions you would like to keep track of.
Category:: The broadest defining element; categories are used to place groupings of things that you want to keep track of into large, easily identifiable sections that can be viewed in Google Analytics reports. Categories are usually quite expansive in scope and can be aggregated in multiple ways to reveal how different types of content, such as videos or search bars, are interacted with by website users.
(Image Credit: KlientBoost)
Action: Listed separately from the more expansive category section on reports, actions keep track of individual instances of interactions with specific UI elements. Getting this right can be somewhat tricky as how actions are named is completely in the hands of website administrators. Similar, but not identical, actions can be lumped together in the same classification, potentially skewing reporting results.
(Image Credit: KlientBoost)
Label:Labels add an additional level of detail to analytics. While categories encompass a broad range of different elements and actions specify what a particular user interaction represents, labels indicate what actions have occurred in more easily identifiable language. For instance, labels are used to display the file names for downloaded content or the titles of videos that visitors watched.
(Image Credit: KlientBoost)
Value:Not exactly an added organizational element, values are added to categories and actions to determine the numerical significance of certain events. Values are almost always averaged and can be used to tally load times, content monetization, and how long it takes for files to download.
Button tracking Google Analytics can be an immensely useful tool for flushing out crucial information related to your website’s online presence. Although for many it’s almost indispensable, getting all the details right can be a bit tricky. Fortunately, there are steps which can be taken to ensure that Google Analytics is utilized properly.
How to Enable Track Click Event Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides lots of options for website analysis by default, but it’s far from comprehensive. There are a whole host of custom options which can be used to reveal how a specific type of event is utilized by website users.
One way to enable custom event tracking is to use Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM is a service which allows for the easy creation and integration of web tags (lines of JavaScript code) into a website’s structure. The service is immensely useful for developing more advanced techniques of tracking website data without having to put lots of effort into learning coding techniques.
Here are the steps that should be taken to enable GTM auto-event tracking:
- Begin by setting up Google Tag Manager and then logging in. Built-in variables need to be enabled for click tracking tags to work. Move over to the variables section and then click the “configure” button, revealing a variable list. The GTM variables list is pretty comprehensive and includes a long list of different UI elements that can be clicked on within most web pages. It covers things like URL clicks, button clicks, and text entries. Although you might not require all of them to be enabled, it’s considered best practice to simply enable everything to prevent issues down the line. For example:
(Image Credit: ZoomOwl)
- The next step is to create a new web tag. On the GTM Dashboard, there will be an option to create a new tag and change the type of tracking being done to an “event.” These are the same types of events which can be found on Google Analytics and also contain fields for categories, actions, labels, and values. These fields should be identical to the information found in Google Analytics to make sure everything is being tracked properly. There is also an additional “True/False” section which is used to track whether a website visitor interacted with anything on a web page. Inputting the tag setting as “True” will not label non-interactive website visits as a track click event Google Analytics.
- The final step is to connect newly created web tags to actions users will take when interacting with a website. These are commonly referred to as “triggers” and can vary depending on what trigger is being implemented. While the number of potential triggers is huge, they all follow the same basic, streamlined process. First, go to trigger configuration and then choose the type of desired trigger (clicking in this case) and then link the particular UI element that the trigger will be attached to. Finish the process by stating that the website URL connected to the trigger will contain the relevant thing being measured (e.g. type of download file).
We hope that you found this article useful.
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How to Test Everything
Although Google Analytics and GTM are very well-designed, it’s still entirely possible for some details to be missed, leading to either the wrong website information being tracked or for click tracking to not work whatsoever. As a result, it’s highly recommended for website administrators to see if their click tracking efforts have been implemented successfully.
Google Tag Manager offers a preview mode which shows what happens when a web tag is enabled and how that ends up influencing a website’s analytics. Also known as debug mode, the preview allows you to see what kinds of UI interactions from users are being triggered, which variables are present on a given web page, which tags ended up not being enabled, and the reasons why a tag ended up not working. Overall, preview is a highly-recommended go-to step whenever any sort of web tag is created.
Within preview, there are a couple of things to keep track of. The first is the error listing, which shows the number of intended actions that ended up not being followed through due to either a program malfunction or user error. However, the most important section to keep in mind is the data layer. The data layer shows what a website’s code looks like after a particular event has been influenced by the inclusion of web tags. These web tag related events are sometimes confused with Google Analytics page click tracking events, although they’re not necessarily the same thing, despite having the same name.
Event Reports
The results of analytics click tracking can ultimately be seen through Google Analytics event reports, listed under the behavior section of the Google Analytics main page.
The reports display several types of information, including an overview of all the events you’re tracking, including the top events that are accruing the most popularity on a daily basis. There will also be a breakdown of which events are displayed on each individual web page on a website. In addition, Google Analytics will also display an “events flow” chart which shows the typical order in which events are triggered, indicating a lot about user behavior and preferences.
Diib®: Google Analytics Click Tracking Integration!
Once click tracking measures have been enabled, their effects can be seen within an hour by taking a look at the realtime homepage section. Tracking these efforts are simple and straightforward within the Diib Digital software. With customized integration, you’ll easily see your campaign results and have the ability to quickly and efficiently tweak your settings for the best outcomes. Here are a few of the features we’re sure you’ll love:
- Google Analytics Integration and Click Tracking Insights
- Bounce rate monitoring and repair
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- Technical SEO monitoring
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FAQ’s
You can see this data by clicking on the category “links” and “select event label”. There you should be able to see the specific links clicked on your website.
PDF analytics intercepts and collects info on all requests for a .pdf file on your website. They collect cookie data, UTM tracking tags and tags in the URL. These are then sent to Google Analytics via their official API.
The easiest way to do this is to trigger the event yourself. You can then see if the event shows up. You can view your tracked events through the “behavior” tab under “events” on the sidebar.
Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track downloads. This is because they can’t request a tracking pixel.
Google Analytics is a free service. That being said, if you want advanced options you will likely want to buy plugins to do those additional services.
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