Clickstream is a record of a user’s internet usage, including pages visited and time spent on them. Clickstream software is available for webmasters to track and analyze user behavior. Clickstream analysis is important in web design, marketing, and advertising, and can be used to rearrange a site’s layout or sell advertising space. Clickstream analysis can be divided into ecommerce style analysis and traffic path analysis, with various types of data provided in graphs and tables.
When a computer user visits a website, they enter a page, which may or may not be the home page, and travel through the site in some way before exiting, most often directing this sequence of events through a series of clicks of the mouse. A clickstream is a user sequence record, not just of a single website, but of their entire Internet usage, including pages visited, time spent on pages, and, in some cases, webmail “To” and ” From” ‘ addresses. The actions and/or habits of a single user or multiple users can be studied when their clickstreams are collected and analysed.
Commercial and free clickstream software is available to webmasters to enable clickstream tracking and analysis on their sites. Examples include the Site Overlay feature in Google® Analytics or dedicated software like CrazyEgg® or OpenSymphony® ClickStream®. Enterprise solutions are offered by Clickstream Technologies® and others.
Clickstream is important in web design, as well as in Internet marketing and advertising. It is at the heart of clickstream analytics and clickstream extraction, both of which leverage captured clickstreams to gain a more comprehensive understanding of visitor behavior. Clickstreams reveal where users click and where they aren’t, and clickstream data can be combined with other types of analytics. Data from a clickstream analysis can be used to rearrange a site’s page layout, reconfigure an entire website, or sell advertising space based on a history of site and page performance.
Some divide clickstream analysis into ecommerce style analysis and traffic path analysis. The first shows not only the sequence of pages and the time spent on pages, but also the items placed in and/or removed from a cart and the final purchase. The latter reveals the number of pages served, the loading time of the pages, the use of the Back and Stop buttons of the browser and at what point in the data transmission the user switches to another page, i.e. if the user it is exiting before the page is fully loaded. Some analyzes can be provided as graphs and tables, but that’s not the limit. CrazyEgg®, for example, provides heatmaps and a confetti page overlay display that both shows the relative location of clicks and also identifies referrers.
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