Beyond Clicks: What You Need to Truly Understand User Actions

One of the most common and popular metrics used by marketers to gauge the initial impact of paid media, SEO, email marketing, and other channels is clicks and visits to your website.

However, truly understanding what happens after the click is what enables you to enhance your marketing efforts, create better customer and user experiences, and ultimately optimize for business goals.

When it comes to analyzing user behavior after they click on an organic search result, email outbound link, paid advertisement, or other traffic channel, two key questions often arise:

• How do you measure user actions after the click?
• What do you need in place to properly measure and understand these actions?

While this article will not focus on «how» to measure post-click behavior, it will concentrate on «what», the essential components you need to lay the groundwork for meaningful analysis. Establishing this foundation is critical before you can successfully address the how.

If you want to truly assess the impact of your marketing channels beyond simple click metrics, you must first understand the prerequisites for doing so.

Without further delay, here’s a list of key elements I’ll be covering, along with why each is crucial for analyzing performance beyond clicks:

• Proper UTM tagging of non-organic traffic
• Use analytics tool
• Implementation of event and conversion tracking
• Complementing with Digital Experience Analytics tools
• Integration is key
• Have a privacy and compliance strategy
• Learn and take action from data (bonus)

Now that you have an overview let’s get started.

Proper UTM Tagging of Non-Organic Traffic

The name of this section gives it away.

Proper UTM tagging forms the foundation of your measurement strategy, especially for non-organic (non-SEO) traffic.

When you fail to correctly apply UTM parameters to the landing page URLs used in your paid media campaigns, email campaigns, and other non-organic efforts, you will lose the ability to determine where your website visitors came from correctly.

As a result, any insights gained from analyzing post-click behavior will be misattributed or, worse, unattributed, making your measurement efforts incomplete and your optimization efforts less effective.

UTM tagging is not just about adding UTM parameters to your destination URLs; it’s about applying best practices, having a consistent strategy, and formatting parameters correctly.

I’ve linked a guide here that discusses common UTM tagging errors I’ve encountered and how they can negatively impact attribution and performance reporting.

Use Analytics Tool

Even with properly applied UTM parameters, without the right analytics tools in place, you won’t be able to measure which clicks led to visits or track the subsequent actions users take on your website.

However, simply having an analytics tool installed isn’t enough.

A strong business and measurement strategy must accompany it to ensure you effectively collect, interpret and act on the data.

When selecting an analytics platform (or a combination of tools), there are several important considerations to keep in mind.

While that’s outside the scope of this guide, it’s crucial to ensure that your chosen analytics solution gets implemented on your website and landing pages.

The analytics tool implemented on the landing page enables the collection of UTM data as soon as a visitor arrives, ensuring the traffic source is correctly captured and attributed.

These web and marketing analytics tools record the acquisition source and track user behaviour deeper into the site, highlighting whether they performed key actions or converted, which leads to the next section.

Implementation of Event and Conversion Tracking

In addition to tracking user visits, you should measure both conversion and conversion/user friction events, such as website errors (404 pages, checkout failures, form submission errors, etc.).

Tracking conversions allows you to understand the true business value of your website traffic: did users complete the key actions you intended?

This is essential not only for performance reporting but also for optimizing paid media campaigns. Proper conversion tracking helps you identify which campaigns, messages, strategies, and creative assets drive results and how much they cost relative to their impact.

On the other hand, tracking conversion/user frictions reveals friction points users encounter after the click. With the right analysis methods, you can measure how these frictions affect your business goals and prioritize improvements to optimize the user journey.

Complement With Digital Experience Analytics Tools

Analytics platforms like Google Analytics (GA4) or Piwik Pro do a great job of giving you the quantitative side of your data, things like page views, events, bounce rates, and conversion rates.

However, they often miss the qualitative side, which is the why behind user behavior.

That’s where digital experience analytics tools come in.

If you’re relying solely on marketing analytics, you might miss important insights into how users actually interact with your website after they click.

To close that gap, it’s a good idea to complement your analytics setup with Digital Experience Analytics tools like Microsoft Clarity (which is free and does a great job), Hotjar, or Fullstory, etc.

These tools are built specifically to help you understand user behavior at a deeper level.

They track things like rage clicks, dead clicks, page errors, user journeys, heatmaps, and session recordings; some even help capture user feedback while browsing your site.

This kind of qualitative data gives you a clearer picture of the user experience that numbers alone can’t explain.

And when you combine these behavioral insights with your core analytics data, you get a much richer understanding of performance, which brings us to the next important point: integration.

Integration Is Key

You might be wondering, how exactly does integration help you better understand what happens after a user clicks an ad, an organic search listing, or any other traffic source?

Let’s walk through a simple example.

Imagine a user clicks on one of your LinkedIn ads, lands on your site, browses a few pages, and eventually fills out a lead form.

In Google Analytics (GA4), you’ll see a conversion from LinkedIn ads. Great, but what about the extra data that helps your sales team in the next steps of engagement with the lead?

Without any integration, your sales team won’t have visibility into the full context of that user’s journey.

If you had integrated tools like Microsoft Clarity with your lead forms, you could capture additional context, like the session recording URL or Microsoft Clarity’s user ID and session ID, along with the lead submission.

This way, your sales team not only sees that a lead came in, but also understands how the user engaged with your site before converting.

That kind of information can be incredibly valuable during follow-up conversations.

Another important example is if the final conversion or purchase happens offline, and you don’t send that offline data back into your analytics system, you’ll miss a big part of the customer journey after a click. Proper integration helps close that loop.

Beyond that, integration can also help you enrich the data you collect in GA4 or other platforms, giving you a more complete, connected view of each user’s experience.

For example, if you’re using an error monitoring tool to track UX and UI issues, you could integrate it with your session recording tool to enrich the diagnostic data you collect.

This integration would allow you to see not just that an error occurred but also watch a recording of how it impacted user interactions after the click, giving you deeper insights into the overall user experience.

Another example is integrating Google Ads or any other advertising platform with GA4. For instance, by importing your ad cost data into GA4, you can add a valuable cost perspective to how you measure performance after a user clicks and visits your website.

Have a Privacy and Compliance Strategy

If you’ve implemented GDPR consent banners or CCPA privacy notices on your website to manage visitor consent, then you’re already taking important steps toward protecting user privacy. But it’s equally important to understand how these privacy measures impact your ability to measure user behavior.

Here’s what I mean:

Imagine you run an ad campaign, and 50 users click through to your site. However, only 20 of those users grant consent for tracking.

So, if you’re analyzing post-click behavior without accounting for the 30 users who didn’t consent, your data will present an incomplete (and potentially misleading) view of how your marketing efforts are performing.

That’s why having a measurement privacy strategy is essential.

One approach could be implementing mechanisms like Google Analytics’ Advanced Consent Mode, which uses behavioral modeling to fill in some of the gaps.

However, keep in mind that this modelling can sometimes overestimate results, and it may not always align perfectly with privacy compliance. It’s recommended to consult your legal team before relying heavily on advanced consent mode.

Another area often overlooked is analyzing your consent opt-out rates. Most Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) provide this data, but many organizations don’t take advantage of it.

Understanding your consent rates helps you better estimate the missing data in your reporting accordingly.

While you can estimate visits fairly easily, filling gaps around conversions and specific on-site actions is much trickier but not impossible with the right strategy.

Learn and Take Action From Data (bonus)

Once you’ve put all the right pieces in place to measure user journeys post-click, from tagging to tracking to privacy management, the next step is learning from your data and acting on it.

It’s not enough to simply collect and report on metrics. The real value comes from turning insights into actions.

You can start by building reports directly inside your analytics tool or go a step further by using a data visualization platform like Looker Studio to create dashboards that answer your most important marketing questions.

When setting up reports in GA4, I highly recommend checking out this guide I wrote on [12 GA4 Reporting Mistakes That Could Cause More Headaches].

It’ll help you avoid common pitfalls and make your reports more impactful.

An example of learning from data and taking action is when you discover that users from a particular campaign are bouncing from the landing page without taking action or that mobile users are adding fewer items to their carts.

Instead of stopping at the observation, dig deeper. Investigate why this is happening and take action based on your findings.

Closing Remarks:

Now you have a clearer understanding of what’s needed to accurately measure user behavior after they click your ads, email links, or other marketing campaigns.

By putting these strategies in place, you’ll not only see beyond clicks and visits, you’ll get meaningful insights into the true performance of your marketing efforts.

If you think there’s a step I missed, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! And if you learned something new from this guide, I’d love to hear about it, too.