Website tracking - the only guide you’ll need

In the current time, everyone is dependent on the internet to search for information, services, tools, location, and so much more. According to the report of Statista, 5.18 billion people all over the world are using the internet to search for information, leading them to explore various websites and web apps. Considering such a high number of users, it is imperative for the organization to consider user experience optimisation to boost revenue. As improved user experience on website or web application leads to better user retention. 

Web tracking helps businesses understand how their digital products are perceived and engaged with, allowing them to optimise their user journey end to end. Both product managers and marketing teams perform web tracking to collect and analyse user data. The objective is to evaluate the customer experience and carry out performance monitoring and behavioral analytics, to optimize the conversion funnel.

This article on web tracking is aimed to discuss this concept in great detail. We will even walk you through the importance and methods of web tracking. By reading this article, you will be able to navigate the web tracking landscape and figure out how to make the best of website tracking for your business.

What is web tracking? 

Website tracking, also known as web tracking or internet tracking, involves gathering data, storing records, and analysing user actions performed across one or multiple web pages. This includes their online activities like search queries, click and interactions, form submission, navigation patterns, and others. Product managers and marketing professionals often spend time on web tracking.

In the process of web tracking, the organisation is able to analyse the user experience and optimize it to enhance engagement and minimize churn. In other words, web tracking can be understood as the technique or method where a website or web application identifies and collects the web tracking data about the users. Nearly all virtual businesses employ some variant of tracking on website, which involves the following:

• Event and user data tracking: When optimising any website or web application, it is crucial to monitor and analyse the different aspects of user visits. These aspects include user source, location, bounce rate, exit pages, events triggered and more. This information supports marketing and product teams in making data driven calls regarding user acquisition and retention. Funnel analysis for different user segments can help you paint a clear picture of what's going on at the product level. 
• User behaviour Tracking: User behaviour tracking is a comprehensive qualitative analysis of how individuals interact with a website. It captures how a user perceives your website or web app, by tracking mouse clicks and movement, scrolls, pauses, eye movement, and even user feedback.

Event tracking helps businesses understand users behaviour as a group, and behavioral tracking helps get an idea about the underlying issues. When combined they can be a powerful tool for optimising user behaviour, and retaining users.

Now that you know about what web tracking is, let us learn the significance of tracking on website.

Web tracking across user journey

Web tracking can be done at every stage of the user journey, to track both qualitative and quantitative data. The idea is to map users' needs across the funnel with their actions on your website and identify gaps. After all, the final objective of any web app is to convert these users step by step and turn them into paid customers or subscribers, depending on the nature of your business. 

We have divided the user journey into three phases, to give you a high level idea about their journey and its linking with website tracking. Let’s dive in:

Phase 1: What brings users to your website 

The business, while monitoring the behaviour of the users on their website or web applications, often takes into account their source and geo-location. This basically helps teams analyse what marketing channels are working and how they can increase conversion for different sources and locations. 

When any business uses this data, it mainly helps them with marketing campaigns,  SEO efforts, and website conversion. With such type of information, organisations can easily improve the structure of a website and its content to improve user experience. 

Phase 2: How are users behaving on your website and web app 

The significance of web tracking is noted in knowing how the users are actually interacting with the website. It helps to effectively monitor and keep an eye on user behaviour like pages they visited, scroll dept, links and buttons clicked, page navigation, and even their eye movements on the web pages. 

To assess if user behaviour is aligned with the company’s goals, Product managers and marketing teams also track metrics like product adoption, conversion funnel, customer journey map and more.  Web tracking even enables them to identify errors in the user journey. 

Phase 3: What led the users to leave 

Web tracking is not only useful in giving information on what users do on a website. In fact, web tracking even helps in figuring out why users are leaving your website or web applications. Let’s look at how it is done? Web tracking collects both quantitative and qualitative data and combines  website metrics like page view, session duration, conversion rate, page load time, page views, etc. and user behaviour analysis to pinpoint frustration issues, rage clicks, and errors. This data gives insight to the product and marketing teams on user engagement and user’s reasons for leaving the web page.

Why is web tracking important?

Web tracking tools are one of the most important tools that organisations integrate with their web apps. Organisations make use of web tracking to collect different web tracking data about their visitors and users. This information is often used by both marketers and product managers. 

We discussed the phases of user journey above and how it maps with web tracking, and identify the factors that help in moving the visitor further down the conversion funnel. The following points are the metrics that can be improved through the three phases mentioned above and are also the reasons that make web tracking so crucial: 

• Insights about user behaviour: You can see how website visitors navigate through your site, which pages they engage with and how, and where they tend to drop off. 
• Understand gaps in user interface: A visual representation of how your website is being used, can unlock both user experience and code issues That must be fixed, but no one is highlighting. 
• Plan marketing campaigns: Once you know what’s working for your users, you can easily double down on it. Web tracking makes just the right information available for such analysis. 
• Improve feature adoption: Just by tracking user actions of your web app, you can easily figure out if a feature is accessible and easy to use. If not, product managers can make the needed changes in the design, to improve product adoption. 
• Reduce errors on your web app: Most users do not report errors and simply move out of your site and never visit you again. But just by being aware of what issue is occurring on your web app and debugging errors, you can avoid this opportunity loss.
• Improve product performance: Web tracking also reveals website issues related to compromised performance, be it load time or API performance. 

As website tracking is related to analysing the user engagement on a website, a related concept to this is mobile app tracking. It focuses on understanding the user activities within the mobile application, like actions taken, time spent, buttons clicked, and more. You can use mobile app tracking tools to gather data on user interactions, usage patterns and in-app events.

What is web tracking used for?

Web tracking is used for several key reasons, like gathering insights about user behaviour, personalising user experience, optimising website conversion, and more.  Let us now learn about those in detail from the below-given explanation. ‍

1. Website analytics - User flow & conversions

Website analytics involves tracking, and reporting data related to your website. It includes website metrics like website visitors, traffic source, exit pages, and more. A prominent website tracking tool is Google Analytics, which is operational on over 29 million sites.

It is also a good idea to go for funnel analysis to enhance conversion rate.. A funnel comprises a sequence of stages a user progresses through to fulfil a specific action, such as registration, purchase, or subscription. Let look at some popular conversion funnels: 

• Lead generation funnel: A lead path represents the process by which a potential customer becomes aware of your product, shows interest, and progresses through your path to become a paying customer.
• User onboarding funnel: Adoption journey encompasses the entire process of guiding new users step-by-step through your web app. The objective of the funnel is to understand at what stage the users are getting stuck within the product. 
• Subscription funnel: It is also known as a subscription marketing funnel, where the new subscribers of the product or website are tracked. They are mainly used by an organisation that offers subscription boxes, SaaS products, etc 
• Free trial to paid conversion funnel: The funnel helps teams track the count of users who are signing up for your product or service and then converting to paid users. The higher the conversion rate the better it is for the business. 
• E-commerce purchase funnel: In e-commerce, a buying journey comprises a series of stages that potential customers go through as they interact with an e-commerce website. The funnel is effective for tracking stage wise conversion. 

‍2. Tracking website performance

Website performance tracking is all about keeping a tab on your website performance and can be bifurcated into website core web vitals  and API performance. Let’s see how these factors: 

•  Websites core web vitals: With web tracking, you can analyse the page loading time. If the loading time is slow, it generally leads to a high bounce rate and user frustration. Such issues can usually be overcome by optimising image size and reducing code. 
• API performance: Web pages often call API to fetch data to enable certain functionality. API API performance monitoring can help teams solve page lag issues. 

3. Monitoring user behaviour and actions

Keeping a tab on website visitors provides valuable insights to site owners. Especially when it comes to understanding user behaviour and figuring out how to optimise their site. You can track a website or web application, to capture the following aspects of user behaviour:

• Mouse movement and click: Being able to track your user’s mouse movement and clicks, can help you figure out feature accessibility and frustration issues. You can deploy a session replay tool for this. 
• Scroll depth: Tracking how far users scroll on a page reveals how much of the content the website users consume and if they reach important information.
• Rage clicks: When a user clicks rapidly at a single element, that’s rage clicking. And it’s an indicator of something broken on your site. 

This information helps marketing and product teams enhance navigation flow, content, call-to-action placement, etc. on their web pages. 

‍4. Optimise organic and ad strategy for marketing

Being able to identify what channels are performing and how users are behaving on their website gives marketers great leverage when it comes to strategizing. With this information, they can pinpoint the channels, content, formats, and even personas. This web tracking for both organic and paid channels can mostly be done with tools like Google Analytics and Google AdSense. 

User data collected through web tracking can include search history, location, interests, and the time of day when a website is accessed. Other data include authentication data, shopping cart contents, and cross-site tracking, which can be collected through cookies.

Common web tracking methods

To leverage website tracking, it is important to look at the methods that collect web tracking data. This data could be either qualitative or quantitative, and you can get it by using website tracking tools.  For qualitative data you can rely on web trackers and analytics tools. While for quantitative data you can go for session replay tools, heatmaps, or cookies. You can also use website monitoring tools.

1. Web trackers

One may ask what web trackers are. A web tracker, also known as a web tracking tool or web analytics tool, is software for tracking web activities. This tool collects and represents user data that helps understand how users are engaging with your web app. Web trackers record different information about users, like their IP address, geographic location, browser information, and device name. 

They even track the website visitors, their traffic source, bounce rate, keyword tracking, event tracking. This information is highly useful in defining both marketing and product strategy. Some of the most popular web trackers are Google Analytics, Amplitude, Semrush, Mixpanel, and Adobe Analytics. Google Analytics is used by nearly 65% of the highest-ranking 10,000 websites. Similar to many other offerings within Google's arsenal, Google Analytics (GA) is available at no cost. However, for people like us, this means a large amount of data going to Google from the websites it monitors closely. 

2. Session recordings

Session recording softwares captures user sessions. These sessions are a visual representation of the mouse movements, clicks, keyboard inputs, and screen interactions performed by users while they were on your web app. Looking at these sessions, you can understand how users are navigating through your web app, where they are spending time, and what actions they are interested in. You can also identify triggers that lead to their disengagement on a landing page. These recorded videos provide a comprehensive view of a customer journey map on your website, and take web tracking to the next level.

Benefits of session recording: 

• Understand user behaviour: The foremost rationale for recording user behaviour is to grasp involuntary user feedback. It places you in the shoes of your visitors, enabling you to perceive the site through their perspective – their scrolling, mouse movement, keystrokes, and other actions.
• Improve user engagement: Website monitoring tools empower product managers to monitor and document user engagement on your platform. The visual representation of how your product is being used helps in highlighting areas for improvement.
• Identify frustration issues: Most users when they come across a product issue, tend to drop off right away. Session recordings are an effective tool for highlighting such issues,  they are causing frustration to the users. Once you know what's not working, you can fix it. 
• Quick error detection: Some session replay tools come with error-tracking features as well.  That helps you identify any technical glitch or error encountered by users. That you can fix to deliver a way better digital experience. If you have a mobile app, you might want to look at some mobile debugging tools.

You can use a session replay tool, like Zipy to start recording user sessions for your digital products. With Zipy you can also perform real-time user monitoring, track and debug errors, and monitor your website’s API performance. It prioritises the user's privacy and is GDPR and SOC 2-compliant.

“5 Stars. In no time, Zipy has become our go-to place for watching user journeys and fixing the most important bugs or workflows that our users are experiencing.”

Sandeep Rangdal, Senior Staff Engineer, Mindtickle

‍

3. Event tracking

Events denote user engagement or interaction with different elements of your website. All of which can be meticulously monitored by tools like Mixpanel, Heap, and other event tracking tools. For example, this may include filling out forms, clicking on CTA, viewing videos, downloads, and others. While session recordings give you an understanding of the qualitative data, event tracking helps you get the quantitative data to back your assertions. Event tracking allows you to track website metrics, conversion funnel, product adoption and much more. 

Noting its significance now, you should understand how actually we can do event tracking. First, you need to identify any key event important for your website, say, for example, signing up for a newsletter. 

The web tracking data collected with website tracking tools can be used by product owners and marketing teams to get better insight into user behaviour and make informed decisions about customer experience. 

You can also use your session replay tool to track events. For example, Zipy tracks events, including page navigation, user actions, and errors. You can also track specific events and see them in relation to user sessions for deeper insight. It combines behavioral analytics with product analytics to help you deliver a great digital experience.

For example, if you have an e-commerce website and your event data clearly indicates a drop at add-to-cart event, you can combine this information with session replays. Thus, with this information, you can analyse the checkout process, find any usability issues, and make required changes to your website. This will, in turn, improve conversion rate and revenue for your business. .  

4. First-party vs. third-party cookies 

Cookies represent perhaps the most widely recognised form of web tracking. You can understand Cookie as a small piece of code that gets saved on your web browser while you're on a website that uses cookies. There are two main types of cookies, namely first-party cookies and third-party cookies. Let us learn about them in detail: 

First-party cookies: 

First-party cookies originate from the website you're actively engaged with, and their primary function is to retain your preferences and activities.

For instance, envision online shopping where you add an item to your cart; a session cookie prompts the e-commerce platform to retain this action. Without such a cookie, transitioning through distinct checkout stages, entering shipping particulars, payment information, etc., would become difficult, as the site would lose sight of your selections upon moving to the subsequent page.

On the other hand, a first-party cookie preserves your enduring preferences, like your time zone and login credentials. In most scenarios, these first-party cookies are pivotal for site functionality, or at the very least, they contribute to enhancing the user's overall browsing experience.

Third-party cookie: 

In contrast, third-party cookies are generated by entities other than the website you're directly engaging with. These are the tracking cookies that accompany your browsing journey as you traverse from one site to another. These cookies primarily find utility in website analytics and advertising. For example, they help the product and marketing team understand how users navigate their website and can also be used by advertisers to deliver more targeted ads to users based on their interests. Remarkably, a recent study disclosed that a staggering 99% of all cookies fall into the tracking and ad cookie category. 

However, Cookie is one of the non-preferred aspects by the users. Here are the key reasons: 

• Privacy concerns: When users navigate a website, they come across cookies and feel like it may take our important information by accepting this. Most website visitors are concerned with online privacy. 
• Data collection: Customers also do not prefer to share their data with third parties without their control. 
• Ad overload: We know that based on accepted cookies, users get targeted advertisements. This can cause excessive ads, causing a frustrating browsing experience.

However you can address some of these user concerns. Here are some steps you can take to make the customer experience better when it comes to cookies: 

• Transparency: Always share some information about the cookie you are using, like what kind of data will be collected, how it will be used, and others. 
• Consent: Every website should have a consent mechanism for accepting and rejecting cookies in the form of pop-ups or cookie banners. This will give them control over the users. 
• Cookie setting: There should be an option where users can customise their cookie settings; for example, they can choose which data to share or opt in and out for particular types of cookies. 
• Limited retention: You can give an option where cookies can be automatically deleted after a certain time. This will help users build trust. 
• Compliance with regulations: When using cookies, you should ensure that they are aligned with GDPR and CCPA, which require certain protections and disclosures regarding user data.

5. Heatmaps

Heatmaps simplify the understanding of complex website tracking data by using colors to represent values in a graphical format. In simpler terms, heatmaps visually represent user interactions across your web page for effortless analysis. For example, heatmaps show the following: 

• User clicks: Where users click most frequently on a webpage. 
• Mouse movements: Track and display the movement of the user's mouse cursor on the page.
• Scroll depth: It shows how far down a page users scroll before leaving.
• Time spent: Indicate how much time users spend on specific page sections.

They empower you to have insights into visitor behaviour and their engagement. For example, the areas where more clicks and mouse movement are present appear to be a warm colour, like red. Likewise, the areas where the activity of the user is less appear cooler, like green or blue colour. This information can be used to improve your website to better align with visitor expectations. This helps increase the conversion rate, reduce the bounce rate, and amplify sales, among other objectives.

By compiling user actions, heatmaps facilitate quantitative data analysis and qualitative data analysis to provide a concise understanding of how your target audience engages with specific web pages or product pages. Heatmaps help with quantitative data analysis by providing a visual representation of numerical data that makes it easier to identify patterns, trends, and variations. For example, take any e-commerce website. If you see intense colour in the image of the product with higher discounts, it indicates that users are more engaged in that section. Similarly, if any area of the website has low intense colour, it will show that users are not interacting or are less engaged with those elements. 

This tracking done by heatmap tools helps improve your web app to enhance user engagement, conversion rate, and sales. And if you combine website analytics tools with heat map tools, this can unlock even more insights.

A heatmap tool, you can ensure whether your website visitors are:

• Accessing critical content or overlooking it.
• Discovering and using key links, buttons, opt-ins, and calls-to-action (CTAs).
• Getting distracted by non-clickable elements.
• Encountering challenges across devices.

There can be different types of heatmaps,  including scroll maps, click maps, and move maps that collect different information: 

• Click maps: Highlight the least and most clicked areas on your webpage.
• Scroll maps: Visually depict visitor scrolling behaviour, revealing the extent of page scrolling and the sections where they invest the most time. This data can guide content placement and engagement strategies.
• Move maps: Track cursor movements of every user, offering insights into their interface navigation. This data helps in refining content layout and optimising key elements like calls-to-action.

Heatmaps complement numerical hypotheses and present data in a comprehensible manner. Judging by the colour palette employed, you can effortlessly determine the high-performing segments of your webpage, areas with potential for enhancement, and sections that need complete redesign.

6. Fingerprinting

Fingerprinting, also known as browser fingerprinting, stands as a form of online tracking that is more invasive than regular cookie-based tracking.

A digital fingerprint comes into existence when a company forms a unique profile of users based on their computer hardware, software, add-ons, and even preferences. Configurations, like fonts installed, choice of web browser, even device screen size, can all be employed by the product manager to create a fingerprint of the user. 

By utilising Javascript, a multitude of data can be gathered about a user's web browser and device. When this data is combined, it reveals a one-of-a-kind combination of information that shapes each user's individual 'digital fingerprint.' The browser fingerprint remains traceable across browsing sessions, even if the user adopts incognito browsing or a VPN to access a site.

For users possessing commonly used laptops, PCs, or smartphones, it might be more challenging to uniquely pinpoint their device through fingerprinting. Nevertheless, the more unique add-ons, fonts, and settings they possess, the simpler it becomes to identify them. Companies can utilise this unique blend of information to establish a user's fingerprint. 

How is browser fingerprinting used? 

Browser fingerprinting is chiefly employed for web tracking. It represents a more hidden means of tracking users compared to solely utilising tracking cookies, which necessitate consent. These are some ways in which companies use browser fingerprinting: 

• Advertising: Browser fingerprinting helps with user identification, profile building, and content personalization. This helps marketers run targeted ads, which any day have a better click through rate and are cost effective.
• Cross-site tracking: Numerous website owners and advertising networks share browser fingerprinting functionality to execute cross-site tracking. This implies that they leverage a user's online fingerprint to track them across the web and gather intimate details about them, including their search history, shopping preferences, and more.

Detecting fraud: Fingerprinting techniques prove beneficial for recognising visitors displaying a pattern of fraudulent behaviour. Moreover, fraudsters frequently employ identity-concealing techniques like disabling cookies, browsing via a VPN, or using incognito mode. These are all areas where fingerprinting excels, as it rapidly identifies users without relying on IP addresses and site cookies.

Privacy laws (GDPR & CCPA) and website tracking 

Web tracking, while legal, is undergoing increasing regulation. Notably, directives such as the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California are providing website operators with clear guidelines for handling customer data.

Starting in May 2018, the European Union (EU) began enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which empowers internet users to have more control over the collection and sharing of their data.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

Under the GDPR, websites that interact with visitors based in the EU are required to transparently disclose their web tracking practices. 

• They must ensure that any shared data is devoid of identifying information. 
• EU internet users must grant their explicit consent before websites can deploy tracking cookies on their browsers. 

Thus, websites can utilise such tracking technologies, but only with prior user approval, unless the technology is vital for the site's core functionality, as seen with cookies maintaining user sessions.

CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)

• CCPA addresses permissible actions regarding personal data for companies under its jurisdiction.
• CCPA states that data collected via web tracking, must be deleted, if requested by the users. Also you must also share what information is being collected and give users the right to opt out. 
• It encompasses online identifiers and IP addresses as personal data, thus encompassing website tracking.
• CCPA doesn't mandate opt-in consent from users for data collection (except for users under 16). However, websites must inform users about the categories of data they intend to collect and the rationale behind this collection at the point of data acquisition. This implies that websites can indeed track users, but they must be forthright about their motives. 
• Using a cookie banner is a strategy that can aid websites in aligning with CCPA requirements.

Web tracking to improve marketing and product strategy 

With website tracking, product managers and marketers can collect qualitative and quantitative data about user action on their digital products. By tracking websites, they can enhance their marketing and product strategy. This web tracking data allows teams to identify the most effective channels and campaigns that generate leads, enabling them to concentrate on high-impact tactics. Insights gained from tracking visitors can help you fine-tune your approach towards product adoption and better conversion. 

For instance, you may discover that advertisements on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) attract more visitors compared to ads shown on websites. This revelation could prompt a shift towards prioritising search ads over display ads. They can then combine this insight with user behaviour on the landing page and optimise the page elements to optimize conversion.

Translate these digital behaviours and profiles into actionable plans for your product, marketing and sales teams. 

Now let's look at areas that web tracking is helping teams with: 

• Map user journey comprehensively: Mapping your consumer's journey is important in marketing as it uncovers decision-making trends and purchasing behaviour. You can perform real user monitoring by leveraging a platform like Zipy, which helps in mapping the customer journey. By understanding the customer journey map, you can enhance both your product and website, drive product adoption and website conversion rate, improve user experience, and analyse funnel.

• Craft personas and optimise content for lead generation: To create compelling content, including an engaging website, it's essential to comprehend the identity and needs of your prospects. When constructing buyer personas, you can factor in demographic aspects such as, location, age, gender, occupation, and Interests.
• Analyze content and campaign strategies: Once you gain deeper insights into your visitors and their preferences, delve into how your present content strategy contributes.

• What blogs are receiving substantial traffic?
• What's the average time spent per page?
• Contention on which page or CTA is better?

• Increase product adoption: 

Product adoption is much needed for getting paid users. Web tracking tools are capable of tracking events, recording sessions, and helping you look at overall data related to users on the web. By analysing this data, you gain insights that not only enhance digital and customer experiences but also shed light on what truly resonates with your website's visitors and users. These insights allow teams to:

• Understand user behaviour: Website tracking data helps to optimise your website’s functionality accordingly and enhance the overall digital experience. 
• Enhance customer experience: You can use user data to construct marketing messages and product recommendations so that customers feel understood and valued.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed in detail about web tracking, its use, and different methods of tracking websites and web applications. Let us summarise the key learning. Web tracking is one of the approaches used by product managers and marketers to have a better understanding of the user's engagement, behaviour, and interaction with the website or web app. It, in turn, helps them to improve the product adoption, customer experience, and even bug tracking.

By reading this article, you will be able to understand different ways or methods of web tracking, associated privacy concerns. It will also help you choose the right approach to web tracking that best aligns with your requirements and resources. If you are looking to start understanding your users, you can go for more than one website tracking tool, including an event tracking tool, session replay tool, or heat map tool.