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Clicks tracking

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Level 5

I´m still new to AA and to track links I´ve been following this documentation here and setting up the clicks on buttons using Success events and rules. However, because I´m creating them as events, on the workspace it is a metric and I can only see the clicks using dimensions. 
I also would like to do a rank of clicks but for that, I would have to set up the buttons as dimensions. How can set up the button clicks as evars? is it also in the rules and report suit/success events? is there a problem to have evars the same as events?

Additionally, I here in the forum suggestions to track clicks using Activity Map.. what is the difference in tracking clicks using success events and Activity Map?

Thank you in advance

1 Accepted Solution

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Correct answer by
Community Advisor

Without knowing exactly how you have set up your click tracking I can only help with some basic suggestions.

 

I will start with the difference between tracking clicks, vs tracking using Activity Map.

 

Tracking specific clicks can be a little more reliable, because you are actually creating specific tracking "call to actions"... these server calls can be set up with whatever metrics and dimensions you need on the click. In most cases this will include enough correlation dimensions based on the page that click was triggered from, dimensions related to the click itself and optionally a metric (you could also just go with the default occurrence if needed). However, it should be noted that these are additional server calls... which will increase your server call usage, and depending on how tightly your contract is budgeted, could result in overage charges if you start adding clicks to everything.

 

Activity Map, on the other hand, collects some basic info about the click (Link that was clicked, Page the Link was on, and the Region the Link was part of - more on this a little later). However, these don't trigger extra server calls... the information is passed on the following Page View. This means you can collect click information without inflating your server calls. (Activity Map data actually gets sent on specific click tracking above if it's enabled and you create click tracking events).

 

 

 

I use a combination of both... I use specific clicks for the really important clicks... things that I really need in-depth or additional information about (things like buttons and links tied to our subscription flow, as well as expand/collapse for things that don't take me to another page - Activity Map doesn't support that). Then I rely on Activity Map for the rest (use of my main navigation, content blocks on my pages, in-line links in the content body, etc). I get enough info from Activity Map to make reports on navigation without creating a lot of special tracking code or inflating my server calls.

 

 

Now, to try and address the "dimension" part of your questions.

 

When you set up any click tracking, you populate props, evars and events like any other server call... however, there is a specific dimension for the clickName (this can be found in Workspace under "Custom Links"). You can use this to distinguish your clicks, or any prop/evar reserved for classifying the actual click.

 

In my implementation, I make sure on all clicks to send basic info - things like my evar that holds the URL of the page, a copy of the Page Name (the "page" value is stripped from clicks, so if you need this, make sure you have a custom eVar or prop set up to hold the same value), my props for the category of the page, and anything else I may want to use in my reports for the clicks - the context of the use (and the metrics) is what distinguishes values (the eVar by "page view" is obviously only coming from the page views, the occurrences is both page views and clicks, but I can use a segment for "custom link exists" to pull out just the clicks, or if I have a custom metric set up, I can use that metric instead - there are many many ways to parse out the data - it really depends on what you have set up)

 

Then I have some eVars/props which are only used on clicks... such as on expand/collapse functions, or maybe for a subscription click I track the package, or the placement on the page, etc... it depends on your site, and what you need.

 

Note that "clicks" really is more than clicks... I think of "clicks" as "special interactions"... they can be clicks, but other times they are triggered by successes... like a successful purchase, or a successful newsletter sign up... I don't track that the user clicked a button... I work with my developers to trigger an event that I can listen for that tells me the action was actually completed successfully... or maybe that it failed... but I track he result rather than just a click...

 

 

The last part I will talk about is info about the Activity Map values (which I said I would come back to).

If you just let Activity Map do it's default thing... it can be not terribly useful / easy to read.

 

  • Activity Map Page should be fine... this correlates to the Page Name you have set up on your site... this is fine as is... and easily mapped.
  • Activity Map Link - this is mostly okay... it takes the "text" from the link that was clicked. In most cases this is decent enough... but it can get a little wonky if people use translate functionality on your site (you end up with all the language variations), and also, let's say you have the same content linked on the page in a few places, but the text is slightly different (maybe there's a category label on one, and a publish dates on a another, and maybe a thumbnail image on the third with some alt text) - the different variations will pick up the text differently... this isn't too bad, but you can override the links for important items if you want.. it will require a little extra coding to make work
  • Activity Map Region - this is honestly the best and worst part of Activity Map. Best, because this is really a powerful way to break down the clicks on your pages by location on the page... rather than looking at all the link variations. However, by default, it will just take the closest "id" value and use that as the region, and generally, developers do no code the ids optimized for tracking    However, this is easily overcome with a little coding. I work with my devs to place data attributes on the containing divs throughout our site that represent the blocks I want to track with Activity Map (data-lpos = basically "link position"). In this way, I tell them to add a data-lpos="main-menu" or data-lpos="content" or data-lpos="footer" to cover all the regions in whatever granularity I need. Then I just make one change in the custom code of my Adobe Analytics extension of
    s.ActivityMap.regionIDAttribute = "data-lpos";
    Which tells Activity Map to use the closest data-lpos value rather than the closest id value.
    Making my tracking much easier to read and use than the default functionality.

 

 

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2 Replies

Avatar

Correct answer by
Community Advisor

Without knowing exactly how you have set up your click tracking I can only help with some basic suggestions.

 

I will start with the difference between tracking clicks, vs tracking using Activity Map.

 

Tracking specific clicks can be a little more reliable, because you are actually creating specific tracking "call to actions"... these server calls can be set up with whatever metrics and dimensions you need on the click. In most cases this will include enough correlation dimensions based on the page that click was triggered from, dimensions related to the click itself and optionally a metric (you could also just go with the default occurrence if needed). However, it should be noted that these are additional server calls... which will increase your server call usage, and depending on how tightly your contract is budgeted, could result in overage charges if you start adding clicks to everything.

 

Activity Map, on the other hand, collects some basic info about the click (Link that was clicked, Page the Link was on, and the Region the Link was part of - more on this a little later). However, these don't trigger extra server calls... the information is passed on the following Page View. This means you can collect click information without inflating your server calls. (Activity Map data actually gets sent on specific click tracking above if it's enabled and you create click tracking events).

 

 

 

I use a combination of both... I use specific clicks for the really important clicks... things that I really need in-depth or additional information about (things like buttons and links tied to our subscription flow, as well as expand/collapse for things that don't take me to another page - Activity Map doesn't support that). Then I rely on Activity Map for the rest (use of my main navigation, content blocks on my pages, in-line links in the content body, etc). I get enough info from Activity Map to make reports on navigation without creating a lot of special tracking code or inflating my server calls.

 

 

Now, to try and address the "dimension" part of your questions.

 

When you set up any click tracking, you populate props, evars and events like any other server call... however, there is a specific dimension for the clickName (this can be found in Workspace under "Custom Links"). You can use this to distinguish your clicks, or any prop/evar reserved for classifying the actual click.

 

In my implementation, I make sure on all clicks to send basic info - things like my evar that holds the URL of the page, a copy of the Page Name (the "page" value is stripped from clicks, so if you need this, make sure you have a custom eVar or prop set up to hold the same value), my props for the category of the page, and anything else I may want to use in my reports for the clicks - the context of the use (and the metrics) is what distinguishes values (the eVar by "page view" is obviously only coming from the page views, the occurrences is both page views and clicks, but I can use a segment for "custom link exists" to pull out just the clicks, or if I have a custom metric set up, I can use that metric instead - there are many many ways to parse out the data - it really depends on what you have set up)

 

Then I have some eVars/props which are only used on clicks... such as on expand/collapse functions, or maybe for a subscription click I track the package, or the placement on the page, etc... it depends on your site, and what you need.

 

Note that "clicks" really is more than clicks... I think of "clicks" as "special interactions"... they can be clicks, but other times they are triggered by successes... like a successful purchase, or a successful newsletter sign up... I don't track that the user clicked a button... I work with my developers to trigger an event that I can listen for that tells me the action was actually completed successfully... or maybe that it failed... but I track he result rather than just a click...

 

 

The last part I will talk about is info about the Activity Map values (which I said I would come back to).

If you just let Activity Map do it's default thing... it can be not terribly useful / easy to read.

 

  • Activity Map Page should be fine... this correlates to the Page Name you have set up on your site... this is fine as is... and easily mapped.
  • Activity Map Link - this is mostly okay... it takes the "text" from the link that was clicked. In most cases this is decent enough... but it can get a little wonky if people use translate functionality on your site (you end up with all the language variations), and also, let's say you have the same content linked on the page in a few places, but the text is slightly different (maybe there's a category label on one, and a publish dates on a another, and maybe a thumbnail image on the third with some alt text) - the different variations will pick up the text differently... this isn't too bad, but you can override the links for important items if you want.. it will require a little extra coding to make work
  • Activity Map Region - this is honestly the best and worst part of Activity Map. Best, because this is really a powerful way to break down the clicks on your pages by location on the page... rather than looking at all the link variations. However, by default, it will just take the closest "id" value and use that as the region, and generally, developers do no code the ids optimized for tracking    However, this is easily overcome with a little coding. I work with my devs to place data attributes on the containing divs throughout our site that represent the blocks I want to track with Activity Map (data-lpos = basically "link position"). In this way, I tell them to add a data-lpos="main-menu" or data-lpos="content" or data-lpos="footer" to cover all the regions in whatever granularity I need. Then I just make one change in the custom code of my Adobe Analytics extension of
    s.ActivityMap.regionIDAttribute = "data-lpos";
    Which tells Activity Map to use the closest data-lpos value rather than the closest id value.
    Making my tracking much easier to read and use than the default functionality.