How The Link Reports Are Calculated
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How The Link Reports Are Calculated |
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The link reports show you what people click on. Every click by every visitor is recorded, even if it's the same visitor clicking through multiple times on the same link. Such click behavior is active: the visitor to the site really is motivated to click those links multiple times, so ClickTracks accurately reflects this. Unique visitors, visitor sessions etc. are not factored into this calculation.
% bars factor incorporate the exit rate
Since exiting is a valid action users can take, the % bars include this in the denominator.
Each percentage bar is:
(clicks from current->target) / (clicks from current to another internal page + exits from current)
Link Reports are based on clicks, not visitors or unique visitors
An exit is counted when it's the last page a visitor sees. The absolute numbers are visible in a tooltip if you hover over the percentage bar. The link reports always show clicks specifically from the current page in the browser to each target URL.
The time period for link reports is the entire date range under analysis. See Selecting date range
Why percentages sometimes don't add up to 100%
Sometimes the Link reports on a page do not add up to 100%. The most common reasons are:
| 1. | Back button is being used by the visitors. They do not follow any pathway out of this page - they return to the previous page and follow a path out from there. |
| 2. | Some of the Links are duplicated. The page contains two or more links that lead to the same target page. ClickTracks can detect all the links in the HTML during display, but cannot determine from the logfile which link was clicked since the target is the same. All the links leading to the page will be highlighted with the same chart, displayed with a white diagonal stripes pattern. (Note that parameter masking can sometimes make pages appear the same to ClickTracks when in fact they're different. See Dynamic Page Parameters for more information.) Show me how |
Advanced users of ClickTracks may want to modify the website link structure to permit duplicated links to be distinguished. See Distinguishing Duplicated Links for more information
| 3. | A link has been removed from the page yet still appears in the logfile. This can happen when significant changes are made to the website structure while still analyzing the older logfile data. The solution is to constrain the range of dates being analyzed to span only the dates after the website changes. |
| 4. | Conversely, the link has been recently added to the page and is not yet appearing in the log data imported into ClickTracks. |
| 5. | The activity for the link is below the Link Display Threshold. See Configuration Options for how to lower the threshold. Show me how |