How to Track User Activity on Your Website: Steps, Tools, Examples

User activity tracking is the process of monitoring, collecting, and analyzing visitor browsing behavior on a website or app.

The easiest and most popular way to start tracking website users is to set up Google Analytics (we'll show you how below). But Google Analytics (GA) can be equal parts overwhelming and limited: it’s packed with options but will only show you what happens on your site, not why.

Read on to learn how you can track user activity on your website with visually engaging behavior analytics tools like heatmaps and session recordings to understand what’s happening, fix functionality issues, and spot those all-important optimization opportunities.

Understand your users with Contentsquare

Use Contentsquare to safely track user behavior and understand how people experience and interact with your website or app.

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Request a demo

Businesses and website owners use a number of tracking software tools to view how users behave on their website. Some of the most common ways to monitor user activity include

Tools like Google Analytics and Search Console
Click tracking (recording which elements on a page users click)
Scroll tracking (recording where users scroll on a page)
Viewing session recordings of users as they use a site

We’ll go over these tracking methods in detail below and show you how to use them effectively.

How to track users with Google Analytics

GA4 dashboard

Google Analytics (GA) is the most popular traditional web analytics tool, used by 74% of web analysis professionals. If you already work with GA, you can skip to the next section. If not, here’s a quick overview of the set-up process:

1. Create and configure your Google Analytics account

Google Analytics is free and easy to set up

In 2020, Google launched a new version of Google Analytics called GA4 (this version replaced the older Universal Analytics version in July 2023).

Here’s how to set up GA4.

And here’s how to switch from Universal Analytics to GA4.

2. Add GA tracking code to your pages

[Visual ] ga4 tracking google-analytics-global-site-tag

GA4 tracking code

Paste the global site tag into the <head> section of every page, or add it with Google Tag Manager.

3. View reports

[Visual] GA4 - Google analytics - user-location-tracking-google-analytics-4-1

Realtime website traffic overview in GA4

Google Analytics will generate reports as soon as you get some traffic to your site.

Start with the Realtime report (Reporting > Realtime) to view live website traffic data and verify that GA is set up correctly.

The problem(s) with GA

GA lets you track many useful quantitative metrics, like ecommerce transactions, custom events, and conversions, but there are two main issues:

1. There’s so much data it can be overwhelming: getting started with GA is fairly straightforward, but becoming an expert can be a full-time job (literally).

Google Analytics: it’s a full-time job

There are so many features and options, and GA4 produces radically different reports to the ones we’ve been used to for the past 5–10 years. Our survey of analytics professionals revealed that 1 in 5 people found tracking tools like Google Analytics to be overwhelming (and that was before GA4).

2. GA doesn’t tell you why users behave as they do: for example, you might learn that a landing page has low engagement from GA data, but you can only guess what’s causing it. That’s why you need to pair GA with user behavior analytics to complete the picture and find out how users really experience your site.

How to track user activity with behavior analytics

Behavior analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing quantitative and qualitative user data to identify how people interact with your website or product, and why.

Behavior analytics tools give context to the insights you get from GA by allowing you to track user behavior on the page directly. Using them together gives you a clearer understanding of how users experience a page so you can fix issues, optimize UX, and improve conversion rates.

Setting up a SaaS behavior analytics tool is just like GA: sign up, add a tracking code, and view reports. Here’s how to get started with the two most popular behavior analytics tools: heatmaps and session recordings.

Track where users click, move, and scroll with heatmaps

Generate various types of heatmaps with Contentsquare

The easiest way to track and visualize where users click, move, and scroll is to use heatmaps.

Website heatmaps are visual representations of the most popular (red) and unpopular (blue) elements on a page, giving you an at-a-glance understanding of what people look at and ignore, which helps you identify patterns and optimize for increased engagement—for example, heatmaps reveal if users actually click on your calls-to-action.

There are three main types of heatmaps:

Scroll heatmaps show how far down the page users scroll, and the average fold position
Click heatmaps show where website visitors click (and tap on mobile)
Move heatmaps show how users move their mouse as they browse

Other heatmaps go beyond just the basics: Contentsquare rage click maps, for example, track repeat clicks and help you visualize points of user friction on a page. They’re a great tool to track functionality issues because they quickly expose non-clickable or broken elements that frustrate users.

When you’re ready to start tracking, here’s how to set up a heatmap on a website or single-page application (SPA) in just a few minutes:

1. Sign up for Contentsquare

Contentsquare (hi 👋) is an easy-to-use behavior analytics software used on over 1 million websites worldwide. Our Heatmaps tool requires virtually no setup and will give you immediate insights from the moment you install your tracking code.

2. Add the Contentsquare tracking code to your website

Simply copy and paste your Contentsquare tracking code or install it directly on a platform

You can add the Contentsquare tracking code via Google Tag Manager by pasting the JavaScript snippet into the <head> of every page you want to track, or by using the official Contentsquare plugin on your WordPress site or online platform.

3. Create a new heatmap

Once you’re in the Contentsquare dashboard, select “Heatmaps” from the left column, then click the “New heatmap” button.

Enter the URL of the page you want to track, then select the type of heatmap you want to set up.

Your selection will take you back to the Contentsquare dashboard where you can edit the heatmap. Don’t forget to name it something descriptive (e.g. “product landing page”).

With the sunburst journey analysis, you have the possibility to really dive deep into all the steps and better understand the customer journey. And Contentsquare can also help us to know which content we push—for example, on the homepage, we use Zone-Based Heatmaps to see which content is performing the best, where people click and where they do not click.

Geraldine Servouze

eCommerce Director at Fresh

And that’s it: you can view your new Contentsquare heatmap from the first recorded pageview.

It will look something like this:

You can view heatmaps by device (desktop, tablet, or mobile) and heatmap type (click/tap, scroll, move, rage click, and engagement zones)

If you want to get more insight from your heatmaps, here’s our detailed guide to creating a heatmap (including the best pages to collect data on), and how to analyze your heatmap once the data’s flowing in.

💡Pro tip: streamline your heatmap analysis by viewing zone-based heatmaps in Contentsquare. This heatmap combines data from click, move, and scroll maps into one visualization that shows which elements users interact with the most.

Tracking this behavior helps you understand what your users find most valuable, so you can figure out if any elements need rearranging on the page to improve the customer experience and boost conversions.

Contentsquare zone-based heatmaps visualize user interaction with darker box areas

A landing page heatmap showing clicks in different A/B test variations

💡Pro tip: if you’re in the game of digital marketing and conversion rate optimization (CRO), then you’ll know that user tracking tools like GA will only show you conversion metrics like exit and bounce rates without explaining why. Contentsquare Journeys, on the other hand, give you the data and provide an explanation—all without you having to switch between multiple platforms.

Investigate ongoing drop-offs or see how a new landing page performs after launch by diving deep into journey analysis with Contentsquare’s behavior analytics tools. Notice a lot of rage clicks on a landing page’s heatmap? Tab over to Journeys in the Contentsquare Dashboard to see if it’s affecting your conversion funnel.

Understand your users with Contentsquare

Use Contentsquare to safely track user behavior and understand how people experience and interact with your website or app.

Request a demo
Request a demo

See how users behave with session recordings

Contentsquare session recordings showing behavior like rage clicks and errors during user sessions

Heatmaps are great for showing you the overall user experience on any single page, but you’ll get richer qualitative insight by looking at how individual users experience your site across several pages. And for that, you’ll need session recordings.

Session recordings (also known as session replays) are renderings of real user actions as they browse a website. Recordings show mouse movement, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple web pages on desktop and mobile.

Here’s how to view session recordings on your site with the Contentsquare Session Replay tool in a couple of steps. If you’re not already a Contentsquare customer, request a demo and add the tracking code to your site.

Privacy-first tracking: Contentsquare is designed to help you understand user behavior, not collect sensitive data. That’s why our session recordings are GDPR-compliant, don’t collect unnecessary information like IP addresses, and suppress all keystroke data (i.e. anything a user types in) by default. Read more about our privacy policy and how recordings work.

1. Activate Session Replay on your site

After verifying that session capture is enabled by clicking on the traffic coverage widget in the top-right corner of the dashboard, select “Session Replay” in the left column.

Once Contentsquare detects traffic on your site, new recordings will appear automatically on your Session Replay List page.

2. Start filtering

After one easy step, you're now tracking user session activity. Next, try playing around with the filter feature to narrow down the list of recordings to the ones most valuable to your user activity tracking goal.

Contentsquare session replay filters

You can filter by criteria like geographic region, separate returning users from new users, or even single out rage clicks you spotted on a heatmap.

💡Pro tip: if you’re using Optimizely for A/B testing, you can automatically filter Contentsquare session recordings by Experiment ID with our Optimizely integration. (This is just one of many integrations that lets you use Contentsquare with your favorite web apps).

[Visual] Contentsquare-Optimizely-partnership Experimentation cycle

Use Optimizely and Contentsquare together for complete experimentation

Set Optimizely X experiments as events to filter Contentsquare insights with the click of a button. In the Contentsquare Session Replay dashboard, go to Add Filter > Google Optimize and paste/select the relevant Experiment ID.

Our A/B testing tool Optimizely is great for telling us how variants within a specific experiment are performing when it comes to KPIs, but it doesn't do a great job of showing us why. With the Optimizely integration with Contentsquare, we're able to be more effective as a CRO program because we can take a losing test and see why it lost—maybe there's points of friction or a minor tweak that could be made to change the outcome of the test. With Contentsquare we're able to build and iterate the losing test, instead of scrapping it and starting out a square one, turning a losing test into a winning experience. That has been a game changer for us. Testing resources are expensive—from developement and creative to time spent—and we're limited by those things. So, if we're able to put something into market, even if its a loss, and we're able to learn and pivot quickly, it's a huge win for us and it keeps us agile.

Sheena Green

Director, eCommerce / Optimizations at Ultra Mobile

3. Review your replays

The final and most important step is to watch and analyze your session replays (popcorn optional, but highly recommended 🍿).

We’ve written a detailed guide to user recording analysis that will help you save time and get maximum insight from your recordings.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare allows you to toggle effortlessly between the big picture insights from heatmaps and the granular detail that individual session replays offer.

For example, if you spot a user clicking on something unexpected during a replay, jump to that page’s heatmap to see how common the behavior is and determine if you need to switch up the page design—or do it all in reverse by zooming in to a replay from a heatmap.

[Visual]heatmaps for website optimization

Contentsquare lets you zoom in from heatmap to replay and out from replay to heatmap

Our Voice of Customer is integrated with Contentsquare. If we get feedback from customers about problems with the shipping flow for example, we can go into Session Replay and watch the sessions. The recording can show us that here is where the API is failing X amount of times. And although we only had a subset of customers reporting that piece, we can see how many times the error has happened today, this week or month. With this data, we can see whether it's an urgent issue that needs our immediate attention or if it's something we need to monitor for a while. Being able to get customer feedback and then figure out if you need to do something in less than an hour makes our prioritization efficient and makes sure it's based on data. It makes it a lot easier and takes the emotion out of what you're doing.

Christy Taroni

Managing Director of Digital Platforms at Fedex

Take it further: combine tracking data with user feedback

Once you spot interesting or unusual user behavior in heatmaps and session recordings, ask your visitors and customers for direct feedback to learn more about why they behave the way they do (for example, why they're about to leave your site).

Just one on-site survey can give you valuable insight and lead to UX improvements and business growth: a single-question survey can help you identify where to improve the customer journey.

With Contentsquare, you can set up our Surveys tool to get instant user feedback on your website. Draw from our survey templates and practical examples to see how real companies use surveys to collect feedback, as well as this list of survey questions to help you figure out the best questions to ask your users.

So we collect customer feedback through a form that is displayed within the pages where customers can show what their experience is, give us a rating and give us their opinion on what the experience was like within the site. We still have to listen to what the customer tells us. Both obviously on the negative parts, which are what we have to work on, but also on the positive ones to see if we are doing the right things. We also did the integration with Contentsquare and we still managed to isolate what are the customer journeys, which were more negative than our experience, to understand where to go to work.

Simone Nobile

Digital Optimization and CRO at Valentino

💡Pro tip: if you don’t have the time to devote to both user activity tracking and in-depth user feedback research, try Contentsquare AI. In mere seconds, you can create a survey for any user activity tracking goal, then automatically generate a summary report that includes a suggested action plan.

Understand your users with Contentsquare

Use Contentsquare to safely track user behavior and understand how people experience and interact with your website or app.

Request a demo
Request a demo

FAQs about tracking user activity

The easiest way to track user behavior on a website is to set up a popular analytics tool such as Google Analytics and Contentsquare Heatmaps and Session Replay.
You can track three main types of user behavior on any website:
- Website traffic data, such as pageviews, bounce rate, and referral source
- A visualization of where all users click, tap, move, and scroll on each page (with heatmaps)
- Individual user browsing sessions across multiple web pages (with session recordings)

How to track user activity on your website

Understand your users with Contentsquare

How to track users with Google Analytics