Tips for Tracking Link Clicks and Button Clicks in WordPress

August 26. 2020

Monitoring visitor’s behavior on a website is a tricky task. You need to know who your audience is and what they are looking for on your website. And, you need to have an idea of how they navigate it, and where does their attention naturally flow. The first aspect of this takes time and experience. But, the second one requires a bit more forethought and preparation. In order to know how your visitors truly behave once they visit your website, you need to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress. Luckily, we are here to show you how.

Why is it important to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress

The inexperienced among you might still be wondering “Why in the world would I bother to track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress? After all, I can simply design my website and see how my friends use it, right?” Well, not quite. To gain proper footing with your audience you need to know how they behave on your website. To do this there are a couple of things you can track. You can track:

• The number of visits on each webpage.
• Time spent on each webpage.
• The number of conversions that webpages yield.

But, one of the newest, and arguably the most sophisticated way to track visitor behavior by tracking link clicks and button clicks. If you know where your visitors click while on your website, you will have a clear idea of how their attention flows. By monitoring your WordPress website, you will soon learn that there are certain patters among your visitors. These patterns can be quite useful, especially for an experienced website designer who knows how to make a website intuitive. So, all in all, if you plan on spending the necessary time to make a terrific website, be sure to utilize tracking for link clicks and button clicks in WordPress.

How to properly set up link and button click tracking

Now that we have a better idea of why tracking links and buttons clicks are important, let’s take a look at how. An important thing to note is that there are multiple ways in which you can track links and button clicks. This is why we are going to go over two distinct ones that are usually considered as the most popular ones. Keep in mind that these methods of implementation differ in difficulty. So, try to pick the one that is most suited to your current knowledge.

Create a Google Analytics account

The first thing we would advise you to do is to create a Google Analytics account. This tool is vital for any serious work regarding SEO management and online traffic monitoring. There is hardly a long-term online marketing plan that doesn’t include extensive use of Google Analytics, especially if you want to implement different tactics. So, do yourself a favor and learn how to use Google Analytics as soon as possible.

Event tracking

So, why is Google Analytics important for tracking link clicks and button clicks in WordPress? Well, it allows you to track events. Every time a user interacts with your content, Google Analytics counts it as an event. While events can have numerous forms, we are going to focus on the “clicks” as they are the subject of this article. With Event Tracking, you can track individual buttons and even add a numeric value for every click. Therefore, once you set it up, you will have a clear report in Google Analytics for all the clicks on your website.

Using plugins

Once you set up Event Tracking you’ll be able to track click events on your website. But, to properly show website data and track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress you will need to install additional plugin. Now, as there are dozens of different plugins, we cannot go through all of them in a single article. Instead, we are going to cover the two that are currently most popular. The MaxButtos, which is quite user-friendly. And the Google Tag Manager, which is more suited for advanced users.

Setting up with MaxButtons

The first feature that MaxButtons offers is the ability to create buttons. But, if you purchase the pro version, you will be able to implement Google Analytics Event Tracking with it. After you create a button in MaxButtons you will have to perform the following steps:

• Go to the Button editor interface.
• Open the Google Evetracking for Button Clicks box.
• Toggle on the Enable Event Tracking option.
• Fill in the information for Category and Action, which you will get from Google Analytics.

The final thing that remains is for you to decide whether you want to count the button clicks as an interaction event or non-interaction event. For interaction events, every user that clicks on the button will be counted as a “bounce”. Non-interaction events count bounce rates whether or not the user performs the click.

Setting up with Google Tag Manager

To track link clicks and button clicks in WordPress you can also use Google Tag Manager. The good thing about it is that it lets you implement more advanced tracking methods. The potential downside is that Google Tag Manager isn’t as user friendly as MaxButtons. Therefore, we advise that only more experienced readers resort to using it.

Now, to do so properly, you first need to create a Google Tag Manager account. Doing so is pretty straightforward after visiting their website, which is why we will not bother with it much. After you’ve done that, you’ll need to add the Google Tag Manager snippets in your header. With Google Tag Manager active, you’ll be able to perform the following steps:

• Create a new tag.
• In the Tag Configuration box select the Universal Analytics.
• Select the Event under Track Type box and type in the Category, Action, and Label.
• Choose when to widget the event in the Triggering box.
• Publish your tag.