Websites have an incredible amount of elements that users interact with. What happens when one of these elements stops working or never worked in the first place? When this happens it often leads to a high level of confusion, frustration creating a negative digital experience for that user. In order to continue improving User Experience on the website, we need to identify when there may be a possible dead link or part of the website that needs addressing. DI and LDM have a custom built solution that will help identify an issue quickly, which will lead to recommendations to eliminate them. This solution is called “Rage Click” Tracking.
A “Rage Click” is captured within Google Analytics as a GA Event. It is a custom solution typically configured within Google Tag Manager by the DI/LDM team. Once in place, it can be found within GA in the ‘Top Events’ report under the Event Category called “Rage Click”.
Get started implementing Rage Click tracking on your website
Implementation is best handled by professionals (it requires development work and experience with Javascript), but if you happen to be code-savvy, here’s a high-level guideline that will help you get started.
Step 1: Prep the custom tag and associated Javascript functions
To start, you’ll need to create a custom HTML tag in Google Tag Manager. You’ll probably want to fire this on all pages, unless you are planning on testing just a single page. Implementations may vary depending on business needs, so do what makes sense to you!
Once you’ve got that in place, here’s where it gets a little tricky: it’s time to write the Javascript. Every site is a little unique, but the general idea is that you’ll want to create a variable that stores click events as an array, and a radius for click events. The goal is to find if users are clicking rapidly in a small area, which could indicate frustration or confusion.
Define the number of clicks you think meets the minimum threshold for frustration (for example: 3 in a 2 second duration) and the radius for the clicks (e.g. 100 pixels).
Next up, you’ll need functions that detect clicks (a listener that will watch for click events and determine if clicks are happening within the defined timeframe, and within the defined radius), then store that data in your click events array.
Once rage clicks have been detected, it’s time to send any relevant data (again, you’ll want to determine what data makes sense for your business here) over to Google Analytics through the dataLayer. This is also managed through Javascript, and you have a lot of flexibility in what information you can send over – number of clicks, where the user was, etc. Any special variables we set here will need to be created in Google Tag Manager so they can be captured and passed to a custom event.
From here, it’s pretty simple: we just need to ensure Google Tag Manager and Analytics are prepared to receive and store our data so we can report on it, long-term.
Step 2: Create user defined dataLayer variable(s) to store your rage click data
Any related data you’ve captured and passed through the dataLayer in custom variables will have to go somewhere; create those variables in Google Tag Manager so it’s properly saved.
Step 3: Configure custom event(s) trigger to track in Analytics
The tag and variables in Google Tag Manager will help trigger our custom Javascript code and pass the data to Google Tag Manager in custom variables, but doesn’t actually pass an event. Next, we’ll create a custom event to track Rage Clicks in Analytics. This event will trigger when your Javascript code pushes information through the GA dataLayer.
Step 4: Create the actual event that will be pushed to GA.
Finally, make sure that you have an event ready to push to GA when the custom event trigger is fired.
Why should you implement Rage Click tracking?
Implementing the Rage Clicks custom solution also includes the following benefits:
- Ability to identify elements/areas on the website where users are clicking multiple times without any result(rage clicking)
- Report on number of users/sessions who are rage clicking
- Report on the type of element which was rage clicked e.g. Image, Text Link, Button
We’ve done it: now what?
- Detect HTML issues such as dead links that can be fixed quickly by the development team
- Fix confusing elements on the website that users may be interacting with by performing A/B Tests
Need help?
Are you curious about “Rage Clicks?” If you would like to have “Rage Clicks” set up on your website, get in touch with our team. Start being proactive and not reactive and get control of your user experience.
