Looking for a way to know how visitors interact with your website? One trick is using a click tracking tool. It’s a way you can unlock a goldmine of data while measuring site-wide performance.
See what works and what doesn’t.
This post details what click tracking is, its benefits, and how you can set it up with Lasso in under two minutes.
Let’s get to it.
What Is Click Tracking?
Click tracking measures the number of times someone clicks a link on a website, email, or app. It’s a way to monitor user behavior and see how they navigate across your website.
The better you understand why someone clicks a link, the better you’ll be able to optimize your site for future visitors.
This way, you can see what’s popular with your target audience. It’s important for several reasons, including:
- Advertising research (affiliate marketers tracking campaigns)
- Design (e.g., software developers)
- User research (customer interactions)
How Does Click Tracking Work?
Click tracking works by inserting a code snippet to the backend of your website.
For example, if you’re using Google Analytics to track events across your site, you’ll copy and paste your Tracking ID into the pages you want to track.
You’ll add a tracking ID to your site’s Header in your theme editor (immediately following the first <head> tag.
When using Google Analytics, on the Home page, click ‘Admin.’
Then, head to Tracking Info and click ‘Tracking Code.’
Next, you’ll copy and paste your Global Site Tag into your WordPress site’s Header.
Now, head to your WordPress site’s sidebar and go to Appearance > Theme Editor.
Then, navigate to your Theme Header.
You’ll place the Global Site Tag immediately after the <head> tag.
This is only one example using Google Analytics and will vary between tracking software.
In this instance, when someone clicks a link, Google receives a signal and stores the information.
It will also provide you with real-time analytics data, including:
- Demographics
- Traffic channel
- Pageviews
If that looks like too much work, some plugins will do this job for you automatically.
Perform a Google search with the keyword phrase “google analytics wordpress plugin” to find one that works best for you.
UX Click Tracking
UX click tracking lets you see your own website’s most visually appealing elements via heat maps.
Tools like HotJar and CrazyEgg generate thermal images and provide you with their user data. The hotter a spot on your website looks, the more times people click it.
It records any link click on a landing page or web page, images, and anywhere else.
Wherever a person makes a click, it’s recorded.
If your users are clicking a random gray area on your website, you’ll see it.
The areas with the most clicks form hot spots (like how the alien in the film ‘Predator’ saw his enemies😉).
Revealing this data can be eye-opening from a designer’s perspective, letting you redesign elements on your website and increase click-through rates.
User Recordings also provide another layer of data to use in conjunction with heat maps.
It traces your visitor’s movements (e.g., a user’s mouse) and can alert you to confusing aspects of your website.
An example from using CrazyEgg mentions how they could spot pain points for users who repeatedly clicked an element and got no response (indicating they thought it should contain a hyperlink).
Getting ahead of these trouble spots ensures you won’t let future clicks go to waste.
Tracking Links In Emails & Pages
Email marketing hosting typically comes with tracking data.
For example, we use Active Campaign with one of our sites, which lets you see several metrics as they pertain to your email campaign’s:
- Open/read trends
- Opens by day of the week and by hour
There, you’ll see engagements including opened and unopened, a summary of opens, clicks, and unsubscribes.
You can click ‘Geo’ and see a satellite map of your subscribers from around the world.
Although, much like Google Analytics, when you set up site tracking with a tool like Active Campaign, you’ll copy and paste the tracking code into the footer of your website.
Then any actions taken by your subscribers get recorded.
Tracking email clicks uses pixels and is another kind of HTML code snippet embedded into your email campaign to track open rate.
When your subscriber or user opens your email, that pixel gets loaded into their browser.
Tracking pixels are similar to cookies as they’re also stored in the user’s browser. Still, because browser extensions can block their functionality, pixels can offer an advantage with less chance of interference.
Active Campaign’s pixel downloads from their server and gets recorded as ‘Opened.’
Tracking which links people click works differently.
Determining whether a contact clicked a link that leads to a web page visit uses a string of query parameters at the end of a URL (aka UTM parameters or urchin traffic monitor).
UTMs are added to page URLs and emails.
The five parameters are:
- utm_medium (e.g., cost per acquisition ‘CPA’)
- utm_ campaign (e.g., Forbes launch)
- utm_source (e.g., Facebook)
- utm_term (e.g., 50% off)
- utm_content (e.g., blog post)
For example, say you landed on this page from Facebook, your URL might look like this:
These same UTM parameters are found in any link click you want to track, whether it’s from an email campaign, online advertisement, or social media post.
Further Reading:
Benefits of Tracking User Clicks
There are numerous reasons why you should track clicks.
Providing the best user experience and knowing what’s working on your website are two worthwhile reasons.
See What Performs Well
You’ll see patterns emerge and what’s driving user engagement.
When you spot areas of your website working well and outshining other site elements, you can concentrate your efforts in those areas.
Meanwhile, you can replace the things nobody clicks with alternatives.
One of our Amazon affiliate sites contains ‘best type’ blog posts with many product mentions.
After a while, we noticed some of those items weren’t getting many clicks than others.
Since we now knew some were more popular, we decided to remove those affiliate products that weren’t driving clicks and replace them with others that would.
Never have downtime; every day of the year, a test should be running – or you’re letting traffic go to waste.
Try a/b testing with Google Optimize.
Some things to monitor could be which links in your header, footer, and CTA buttons get clicked (or tapped) the most.
Seeing that data could help you decide which kind of content to create and resonates with your audience.
If you use a heatmap, you can even see the specific word someone clicks.
Using link tracking and heat map tools let you simultaneously triangulate information, so you’re not relying on only one data set.
Test until you waste no element on your website. Incorporate the Information Density concept.
Improve SEO
Using robust analytics tools to track links (e.g., monitoring Events in Google Analytics) can also show you other metrics, including:
- Bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- User sessions
Some pages may have higher bounce rates or low pageviews. Uncovering the reasons why could reveal why the content isn’t performing well.
Monitoring this data can help you make site-wide improvements, signal to search engines that people like your content, and should be used as a part of your overall SEO strategy.
The more time people spend on your site, the more website traffic you’ll see.
Increase Conversions
Identifying both good and bad elements on your site lets you make changes and result in more sales, leads, and conversions.
You can see the number of clicks with any product or link.
For example, if you realize your CTA buttons aren’t visible above the fold (ATF), move them higher up your page.
Or, you may notice a specific link in your footer gets a lot of clicks.
You might want to create content to complement what’s behind that click and make more things relevant to your audience.
If you have multiple content mediums on your website, for example, a podcast and a blog, you can see who’s clicking more on the blog-related content versus your podcast.
These are things you can optimize for to gain greater traction.
You might also notice that people are clicking on your tools and resources pages, so perhaps make adjustments could enhance the user experience while increasing revenue.
Our Team Of Affiliate Marketing Experts Will Teach You How To:
- Outrank Bigger Sites
- Monetize Your Content
- Engage Your Audience
Use Google Search Console (for a Second Opinion)
Employing Google Search Console is another dimension to use so you can see which organic queries generate the most website traffic.
For example, you’ll see the number of clicks and impressions a specific post displays in the SERPs based on a particular search query.
You can then upgrade the page to increase CTR; then, once it’s performing better, you can track links within those posts.
Optimize Your Content Based On Google Analytics Data
Monitor your posts and pages with Google Analytics and optimize your content around the top performers.
If you want to upgrade (or
You can see what pages perform best.
If it isn’t monetized well, or links aren’t performing, you can dig into the reason why, and replace the old tracked links with new ones.
How to Set Up Click Tracking with Lasso In 2 Minutes
It’s easy to set up click tracking with Lasso. You’ll need to copy and paste your Google Analytics tracking ID into your Lasso General Setting page.
To find your Google Analytics Tracking ID, head to the home page, and navigate to Admin > Property Settings > Tracking ID.
Copy your tracking ID and then paste it into your Lasso General Settings page.
To do that, head to your Lasso Dashboard > Settings > General and paste your tracking ID into the info bar.
Toggle ‘Enable Click Tracking’ to Green.
Then scroll to the bottom and click ‘Save Changes.’
Lasso adds Event tracking to every single affiliate link or product link and records those event clicks in Google Analytics.
For more details, watch this tutorial.
Last Words
Understanding your audience’s behavior and how they interact with your site is invaluable information.
It will help increase conversions and see your top performers.
If you’re trying to look for ways to optimize your website, click tracking is an essential step for acquiring a deeper understanding of your audience.
Curious to learn more? Read this.
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