Button click patterns?

The scenario:

I want to know which buttons are being clicked so I can make the webpage more usable. 

Requires:

  • Google Tag Manager (GTM)
  • “Click” event presets need to be imported 

Steps:

Set up a trigger in Google Tag Manager

  1. Login to  Google account 
  2. From the Tag Manager icon, select the account and container you want to edit 
  3. Once in the proper workspace, select “Triggers” from left side menu 
  4. Select “New” from the top right 
  5. Enter a name for your trigger that matches the event you want to track.  
    (For example, we will create a tag called “home_visit-button_clicks“) 
  6. Under “configuration” select “Click – Just Links” and then “Some Link Clicks” 
    • You can then define the buttons you want to track by any of the parameters listed.  
      For example, if you want to track how many clicks the “Visit” button on your homepage is getting, you would select: 
      • “Click URL” > “equals” > “www.your-visit-page-url.edu 
    • If you do not see the “Click” parameters, you will need to enable them in the GTM Variables. 
  7. Now you can save your trigger 
  8. Create more triggers for specific buttons on your page 

Set up a tag in GTM

  1. Select ‘Tags” from the left side menu 
  2. Select “New” from the top right 
  3. Under “Tag Type” select “GA4 Event” with “GA4 Configuration” as the configuration tag 
  4. Create an Event Name of “home_button_clicks” with the parameter {{Page URL}} and set the value as www.your-home-page-url.edu 
  5. Set “home_visit-button_clicks” as the trigger 
  6. Add any other triggers you created in the first step that are related to button links on the home page 

Set up an event in Analytics

  1. Go to your Analytics dashboard 
  2. Select the “ADMIN” icon 
  3. Select “Events” 
  4. Select “Create event” 
  5. Name the event the same as the tag, in this case, “home_button_clicks” 
  6. Set the Parameter as “event_name” 
  7. Set the Operator as “equals” 
  8. Set the Value as “home_button_clicks” 
  9. Save 
  10. You can select “Preview” to test your tag in debug mode. Click on the link you have a tag set up for, and then check to see if it was triggered under “Tags” in debug.
  11. Once you see that your tag is triggering, click “Submit” in the top right corner to publish your changes. If you don’t click “Submit”, your tags will not go live. 
    • Add a note explaining the tags/triggers you created. 
  12. Tags take up to 24 hours to report to GA4. Check back in 1 day. 

Considerations:

The advantage of setting up tags, triggers, and events is that you can mark the events as “conversions” in GA4.  

You can also specify the conditions of your trigger configuration and parameters of your tag configuration much more granularly than in GA4.  

For example, if you have several “Visit” links on a page, you can set up triggers for each link individually to test which of those links are getting more hits. This is accomplished by specifying a Click ID, Click Text, and/or Click URL. 

Further data exploration:

Remember that when you change an existing report, you are changing it forever. Make a copy or use a new report if you want to explore.