The Self-Service Data Roadmap

Chapter 6. Clickstream Tracking Service

In the journey of creating insights, one of the increasingly important ingredients is collecting, analyzing, and aggregating behavioral data, known as clickstream data. Clickstream is a sequence of events that represent visitor actions within the application or website. It includes clicks, views, and related context, such as page load time, browser or device used by the visitor, and so on. Clickstream data is critical for business process insights like customer traffic analysis, marketing campaign management, market segmentation, sales funnel analysis, and so on. It also plays a key role in analyzing the product experience, understanding user intent, and personalizing the product experience for different customer segments. A/B testing uses clickstream data streams to compute business lifts or capture user feedback to new changes in the product or website.

As clickstream data is used by a growing spectrum of data users, namely marketers, data analysts, data scientists, and product managers, there are three key pain points related to the collection, enrichment, and consumption of clickstream data. First, data users need to continuously add new tracking beacons in the product and web pages based on their analytics needs. Adding these beacons is not self-service and requires expertise to determine where to add the instrumentation beacons, what instrumentation library to use, and what event taxonomy to use. Even existing tracking code has to ...