When it comes to understanding your audience, you can’t get more granular than a website click tracking tool.

Instead of looking at big-picture metrics, you can drill down to the basics and get to know what works with your audience — and what doesn’t.

Lots of site tracking tools exist, but website click tracking tools offer the most depth when you want to better understand user behavior.

To see what I mean, visit a website you’ve never seen before. Just Google a broad topic, such as “marathon training” or “best thriller novels.” It doesn’t matter.

Click on one of the search results, then explore the site as a consumer. Pay attention to where you click and what draws your attention. You don’t need to know why just yet, so focus on your specific activity.

That’s what website click tracking is for. You can’t track down all of your visitors and look over their shoulders while they navigate your site.

However, you can get the next best thing with click trackers.

You need to know how to use website click tracking tools and what to do with the results you get in the form of user behavior reports. I’ll cover all of that below.

Plus, I’ll show you how you can combine different website user tracking software options to boost your results.

What Is Website Click Tracking?

Website click tracking uses a software program to generate reports on where website visitors click on a specific page on your website. You install a code on the backend of your site, usually in the <head> section, so the tool can connect with your site.

When someone clicks on your website, whether it’s a link or form field or something else, it sends out a signal. A website click tracking tool can receive that signal and generate user behavior reports based on that information.

It’s kind of like GPS navigation. If you have GPS installed on your phone and you’ve used a software program to track your teenager’s car, you can access the app and see what addresses the car has visited and what routes it’s taken to different places.

User behavior reports, which come from website click tracking, provide you with a map of sorts that tells you about website visitor activity. Based on that data, you make decisions about how to redesign your site, direct visitors’ attention, and remove distractions.

When you track clicks over a long period of time, patterns begin to emerge. For instance, you might discover that a particular link in your top navigation bar receives the majority of clicks on your homepage.

If you can figure out why that link — and it’s associated page — attract such attention, you can capitalize on it.

For instance, you might want to add an email signup form to the destination page so you can capture more leads.

You could also add more content to that page so your visitors spend more time on your site.

Why Is it Important to Track User Clicks and Learn How People Navigate Your Site?

Every website has its own unique audience. People who visit NeilPatel.com will navigate it differently from people who visit CrazyEgg.com. There’s undeniably some overlap between those two audiences, but the sites serve different functions.

For instance, many people who visit NeilPatel.com are interested in the latest article, podcast, or video. They want to consume information.

They often visit the blog immediately or click on the link to the blog to go there right away.

Those who visit Crazy Egg might also want information. We publish a prolific blog with tons of interesting content.

However, they might also be interested in website click tracking tools, heatmaps, and other user behavior reports. Maybe a friend has referred them and recommended our service.

If I know where people are clicking on my sites, I can optimize each one for conversions. Plus, I know which pages deserve most of my effort.

I recently wrote a post about my website traffic and the number of posts I’ve published. Nearly 50 percent of my traffic comes from my top 50 pages, and a ton of my traffic comes from the top 10.

Combining this information with a website click tracking tool would allow me to optimize the most-trafficked pages for optimum performance.

The Best Click Tracking Tools

If you want to track website clicks, you need the best click tracking tool for the job. I recommend using more than one tool for the best results.

You’ll know you’ve found a good website click tracking tool when you discover a tool that allows you to generate multiple types of reports and data. For instance, Google Search Console, which I’ll cover in detail below, allows you to generate tons of different reports based on the information you need.

Use one tool to collect information about overall traffic. Which of the pages on your site get the most traffic? Which ones have the lowest bounce rates and the most time on page?

Those are the pages on which you should focus your energy. There’s no reason to spend hours optimizing a page that gets 1 percent of your total traffic.

Once you’ve identified those pages, generate user behavior reports, including heatmaps and recordings. I’ll get into those in detail below.

In this stage, you’re tracking specific click activity on your pages. A website click tracking tool can generate tons of data to help you optimize not only for traffic, but also for referral source and other factors.

Google Search Console

We’ll start with Google Search Console, which is completely free to use and full of tons of information. For instance, if I want to know how much traffic I’m getting, I can generate a report.

The screenshot above shows my traffic for the last 30 days.

If I filter my traffic based on pages, I can see more information. For instance, I can compare all pageviews to unique pageviews. I might want to focus on uniques because they discount multiple sessions by the same person within a 24-hour window.

You can get lots of other data from Google Search Console by using the filters on the left-hand side of your dashboard. The further you investigate the data your website generates, the better you get to know your audience.

Heatmaps

The next website click tracking tool you’ll want to use is a heatmap.

A heatmap shows you activity on a given page using color temperature.

The warm areas — red, orange, and yellow — signify more engagement with those parts of the page. The cooler areas, rendered in blue and purple, signify lower engagement.

In the example above, you’ll notice that the CTA “Schedule Now” doesn’t get many clicks. It’s very cold in the map. However, the screen lights up over the logo, top navigation, and part of the hero image.

Using this heatmap, the site owner could move the CTA to a different part of the page, use higher contrast to make it stand out more, or test more compelling CTA copy.

Crazy Egg offers lots of user behavior reports, including scroll maps, which can be highly illustrative when it comes to getting to know your audience. A scroll map shows where people stop scrolling, start scrolling, or pause.

Let’s say you publish lots of long-form articles on your blog. A scroll map can help you determine how often your audience actually reads to the ends of these posts.

Additionally, when you pinpoint an area where people stop scrolling, you can insert a high-quality CTA. You want to keep the reader on the page, so provide an incentive to dive further into your site.

Recordings

Recordings provide even more data from your website click tracking tool. They allow you to observe the mouse activity when a visitor comes to your page.

You’ll see when they click on or engage with an element on the site as well as where their mouse point goes as they explore a page.

Recordings can help you decide where to put CTAs, images, body copy, and other elements on your website.

They can also let you know where visitors get confused. For instance, if they repeatedly click on an element and get no response, they might assume the element should include a hyperlink. By addressing the frustration, you improve user experience.

How to Check Clicks on a Website Using Heatmaps

Generating a heatmap is easier than you might think when you have the right website click tracking tool.

At Crazy Egg, we call them snapshots because they give you a photographic image of what people are doing on your site.

When you generate a heatmap, you’ll want to wait until you’ve collected 60 days’ or 25,000 visitors’ worth of information. That way, you know your test has reached statistical significance.

Your snapshot will then become available. Each view will show you data in a different way.

For instance, the confetti map produces dots that represent individual clicks, while the overlay map shows you clicks on each element based on its percentage of total clicks.

Step by step

To generate a heatmap, log into your Crazy Egg account or sign up for a free 30-day trial. Once you’ve installed the code on your website — full instructions are available — click “Snapshots” in the left-hand menu, then click the button to create your first snapshot.

Click the icon to create a single snapshot, then enter the URL of the page you want to generate reports on. You can name your snapshot whatever you want.

You can also decide what screens you want data to be taken from, how long you want the snapshot to run, and whether you want to delay the start date, among other customizations.

That’s it! After you review the information you’ve provided, you create the snapshot.

Start Using Crazy Egg to See What’s Working and What’s Not

Now that you understand how a website tracking tool can improve your relationship with your audience — and anticipate their needs — use Crazy Egg to figure out what’s working on your website and what could use improvement.

The more data you collect, the more you can improve the user experience.

Conclusion

Do you want to know how your website visitors behave? If so, a website click tracking tool can provide valuable insight.

User behavior can tell you whether visitors understand how to navigate your site, whether they’re attracted to your CTAs, and if they scroll down to view more of your content.

You can also gain deeper insight into metrics you might be tracking, such as bounce rate and time on page.

Consider running user behavior reports with a website click tracking tool on multiple pages. Single out the ones that get the most traffic or that contribute most to conversions.

Before you know it, you’ll have turned your website into a lead generation machine.

Start using the best website click tracking tool