Why you should track every (important) interaction

When it comes to website analytics, the most common analytics tool used is Google Analytics.

When setting up Google Analytics, you automatically get which pages the customers visit. To measure conversion, the most common way is to connect conversions to a user visiting an “order confirmed” page.

But what about the customers that are not converting?

You wonder where you lost them, you can see which page they last visited but not what the customer was doing there. What hurdles did the customer face on their way to conversion?

When you track customer interactions, you can follow the trail of what your customers are actually doing on your website.

Measuring these interactions over multiple customers gives you a better understanding of how your customers use your site. Example scenarios include:

• If you have a form, which field did customers get stuck on before they left your site?
• If you have multiple “add to cart” buttons, which converts better?
• If you can get to a product page from the menu or a link on the page, which navigation method do customers use most often?

All these questions can be answered if you tag every important interaction on your page.

I say important because that may differ depending on the type of site you have.

It’s far more important to track how far a user scrolls on a blog to measure engagement compared to an e-commerce site. Consequently, on an e-commerce site it’s really important to measure how many abandon their carts which has no significance on a blog.

In the coming posts, I will break down Component Analytics and how it measures all interactions. I will then compare it to other ways interactions are commonly measured.

– Samy