SaaS Tracking 101: How to Track Customer Engagement In-App

SaaS tracking is an essential method for uncovering weak spots in the product UX and the user flow by analyzing how users engage with your UI.

You first have to understand the basics of click tracking and work with different tools and SaaS management software to track in-app engagement.

This article will equip you with all the necessary knowledge about:

Types of data can be tracked.
What to do with the data you collect.
Tools to use to capture user clicks.

Let’s begin our journey and unlock product growth optimization opportunities with click tracking!

What is SaaS tracking?

SaaS click tracking refers to the number of buttons, links, or text clicks on the web interface users perform during a session.

However, you can also track email by clicking (below, we will go through it in detail).

To gather user click data in SaaS, you have to work with click-tracking tools that record all the mouse moves, taps (on mobile devices), and clicks made by users while engaging with your product.

The collected data can be visualized in charts, heat maps, or screen recordings.

Most important SaaS metrics to track in SaaS apps

When it comes to running a successful SaaS business, tracking the right metrics is essential. By monitoring key performance indicators, or KPIs, businesses can gain actionable insights into their business model, revenue, user engagement, average revenue per customer acquisition costs, and more.

Some of the most important metrics to track include:

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue – calculated by multiplying the total number of paying users by the monthly (annual) subscription price. MRR is important for a SaaS company because it provides a clear picture of a business’s recurring revenue stream and helps to identify trends in revenue growth.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – calculated by dividing the total cost of sales and marketing by the number of new customers acquired in a given period. CAC is important because it helps businesses understand the true cost of acquiring new paying customers and make data-driven decisions about pricing strategy.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – calculated by multiplying the average annual revenue per user by the average customer lifespan. CLV is important because it helps businesses to understand the long-term value of their customers and make informed decisions about customer acquisition and retention.
Monthly Active Users (MAU) – calculated by counting the number of unique users who engage with a SaaS app within a given month. MAU is important because it provides insights into user engagement and retention rates, and can help businesses to identify opportunities for improving their product or service.

However, in today’s article, we will be focusing on click-tracking SaaS applications and how tracking clicks can help businesses optimize their website or app design, improve the user experience for customer success, and increase conversion rates.

While these other metrics are important for overall business success, click tracking is an important metric specifically focused on analyzing user behavior on a website or app and can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of design and content choices.

Why is SaaS click tracking important for product teams?

Here are three main points why the product, UI/UX designers, sales, and marketing teams should implement click tracking.

Product managers: to understand product usage and in-app engagement and make informed decisions on the product development process.
Product marketers: to track marketing efforts and understand which marketing channels and campaigns work by tracking the number of clicks on links and CTA.
UX designers: to grasp how users engage with the web app and identify friction points in the user flow to improve the conversion rate through better in-product design.

How can click tracking help you understand user behavior in SaaS

UX click-tracking analysis is the most actionable and insightful method to spot product friction in SaaS, as you can track how many customers and users engage with each feature separately and in real-time.

Now, let’s focus on how click tracking helps you understand user behavior and how to act on these insights.

Understand what features different user segments engage with the most

In other words, these features are crucial to the number of active users and help them get the job done. To illustrate, let’s say you are tracking engagement with your key 2-3 features.

Understanding how many clicks each feature gets provides you insights into whether or not your users are interacting with your core product features.

Track feature usage with Userpilot

Identify friction and bugs to achieve sustainable growth

Using heat maps, you can identify friction points at each step in the user journey.

Pair them with screen recordings (session replays), and you’ll have a great, better understanding of what and why causes friction in the average userflow.

Use takeaways and recordings to create detailed bug reports that help developers reproduce issues and fix them faster.

Improve user engagement and product adoption

Once you’ve discovered where users get stuck, you need to identify where your in-app guidance is most needed to facilitate onboarding and get customers faster to activation.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty common when customers use only part of the product functionality, and valuable, relevant features to their tasks stay off the radar.

To fix this, use interactive walkthroughs and an onboarding checklist to guide new users through the onboarding process and help them become power users of your product.

Example of an interactive walkthrough created with Userpilot

Types of user click data you can collect for SaaS companies

Click tracking is an umbrella term for:

Email click tracking (gathering data from email campaigns);
Link clicks tracking;
UX clicks tracking (collecting data directly from the website);

Let’s get more granular with each method and discover what value each brings.

Email click tracking

When running email marketing, we often track metrics like open rate (how many recipients opened our email), CTR (click-through rate), unsubscribed rate, etc., to evaluate business performance and how successful our campaign was.

Track clicks with email analytics.

Usually, these metrics are provided by default by email marketing tools. But how do they get that data?

In most cases, email senders incorporate a pixel into each email before sending so that they can track when an email is open.

The same works with in-email link tracking — when inserting our link in the email body, the email services apply the mask to this link getting people to the redirecting page first and then to the destination page.

It happens within milliseconds, so recipients can’t notice this.

For example, you inserted the link https://userpilot.com/blog/ux-analytics-saas/ in the email body. To catch clicks on this link, an email service provider will address people to https://b2bfamily.com/?=exemple3212 instead and record this session.

Next, the email provider will match the attribute example3212 with your initial link and show a user the correct link.

Another way for link tracking in emails is to add a URL string.

Link tracking

Link tracking is used for identifying the source of traffic (which link the user clicked on to get there) in Google Analytics (GA) from different marketing campaigns.

For instance, we run Google Ads, and we want to know exactly which campaign performs better to double down on what’s working.

To differentiate ads from each other and collect unique metrics, marketers add UTM codes to the destination page. Thus GA can generate a super detailed report on performance for each campaign.

Track links with Google Analytics.

UX click tracking using heat maps

UX click tracking helps you understand how users engage with your web app — what UX elements they find enticing, what part of a feature seems challenging to interact with, etc.

In a nutshell, UX analytics gives you data on user experience to recognize obstacles in the user flow and fix them.

Let’s look at the most popular click trackers for gathering data from a web app.

Userpilot’s heat maps highlight what UI elements visitors click on often and what is scrolled through.

The tool records any interactions with your app, from mouse movements to white space clicking, and creates a snapshot, marking hot and cold areas for you to see the complete picture.

Track user behavior in-app with Userpilot’s heat maps.

Red spots mean users constantly engage with these elements while cold areas are the ones they avoid. This helps you understand how users interact with key features of your app.

UX click tracking using feature tagging

But there’s another way to analyze user behavior in SaaS apps.

UI tagging or feature tagging is a popular way to track feature engagement inside your app.

If your goal is to gauge the number of clicks on specific buttons or links inside your SaaS, go to the Growth Insights section in Userpilot and tag the feature you’re willing to track.

As a result, you will get detailed reports for each UI element describing how often users interact with your features by tracking UI engagement.

Feature tagging in Userpilot.

Other methods of analyzing user behavior in SaaS apps

Other methods of user behavior analysis will give you a complete picture of the health of the user experience and help you minimize customer churn. Here are some to consider:

User feedback widget tools;
User journey and funnel analytics tools;

Funnel analytics in Userpilot

Session recordings analytics tools;
Usability testing tools;

Use them to understand the nature of user behavior and usage data and refine your product accordingly.

What are the best click-tracking tools?

How do you track these clicks, you might ask.

Here are the best tools that enable product teams to capture users’ clicks at the different steps of the user journey:

Userpilot — for tracking UI feature engagement using feature tagging and heat maps;
Hotjar — for tracking where users click on the landing page using heat maps;
Google Analytics — for tracking links using UTMs;

Userpilot — for tracking user behavior in-app

Userpilot is a product adoption tool that you can use to build in-app guidance using tooltips, modals, checklists, etc.

To understand which features users are not engaging with you can set up feature tagging and track engagement across the UI.

Setting up feature tagging in Userpilot.

Once you’ve got click tracking data from feature tags, you can monitor feature engagement with a separate dashboard.

Monitor feature engagement with a dashboard

Knowing which features users are not engaging with enables you to design highly relevant in-app tutorials to get them to reach product milestones and increase lifetime value.

You can also use funnel analytics and path analytics to further track customer journeys.

Path analysis in Userpilot

Use checklists to create personalized onboarding to help customers get started. Customize its look & feel and content to make the onboarding flow enticing and seamless.

Create an onboarding checklist in Userpilot.

Hotjar — for tracking where users click using heat maps

Do you know how often visitors interact with your Get a Demo button or other crucial elements on the website that drive conversions and new signups? Start using Hotjar’s heat maps and session replays to track clicks and measure user experiences.

With Hotjar heat maps you can track just how many users of users engage with your product’s interface and what are the most used elements. You can then optimize the user experience by rearranging your dashboard in a way that provides the best usability.

Click tracking with Hotjar’s heat maps.

Google Analytics — for tracking links

Google Analytics not only tracks what links a user clicks but also helps you attribute traffic from different marketing channels by assigning credits for conversions across the customer journey.

Thus you will know what traffic source impacts the most on attracting new customers,and what channel/campaign prompts them to buy the product.

Track links with Google Analytics.

Conclusion

These days we have to create an outstanding user experience to win the competition, acquire customers, and get them to stick with us for good.

UX analytics and click-tracking greatly increase our customer retention rate because both methods inform us where users meet obstacles in real-time.

We just have to draw conclusions based on collected insights and make data-driven product updates.

Ready to work on user satisfaction and seamless user experience? Get a Userpilot Demo and start collecting actionable insights from existing customers right away.