Tying Interaction data to navigation – What it is and why you should avoid it

A practice on some sites that use Navigation Tagging is including interaction metadata in the navigation.

The most common case is including data about which link the user clicked in the pageview.

In this case, you want to know how the user navigated to this page.

There are several problems with this approach:

• Why did the user leave?: If a user lands on a page and then leaves, you will not know what they did last before leaving.
• There’s a lot of data to an interaction: You can include a lot of data about the interaction when you tag it. Adding all that data to your pageview makes it bloated.
• Losing Same Page Interactions: Not all interactions on a page lead to navigation. Your non navigating buttons will be omitted.

You’re only getting limited data compared to the data that an interaction offers.

In the context of the interaction you can add a lot of metadata.

Data that makes sense in the context of the interaction, examples include:

• Where on the page is the link. For example in the menu or the footer
• External Links: Does the link lead to an external site. This is not reported at all if you only tag pageviews as it’s on someone else’s website.
• Link visuals: Some links look like buttons, some like ghost buttons, some are part of the text. Knowing what type of links your customers click helps understand customer behavior.

– Samy