When it comes to tracking user activity in web applications, there are two main things to worry about: the pages a user visits and the actions they take on that page, such as button clicks and text inputs.

If you’re only interested in page visits, then Google Analytics is an excellent tool. If, however, you’re interested in observing and drawing insights from user behavior on your website, this article is for you.

In this article, we explore what user behavior data to track, how to track them, and the best tools for tracking them.

What is user activity tracking?

User activity tracking involves monitoring how users behave, engage, and interact within your web applications. It helps companies make data-driven decisions based on the behavior of in-app and website visitors.

Types of user behavior data to track

There are three main data types for tracking user behavior:

• In-app product interactions.
• User activity across the customer journey.
• In-app user behavior flow data.

Let’s explore each one in detail.

In-app product interactions

In-app product interactions refer to the actions users take after logging into your product. Specifically, it tracks how users engage with specific features and functionalities within your application.

This data comes in different forms, including:

• Feature usage data: How often users utilize a feature and how they interact with it (via clicks, swipes, etc.).
• Feature combinations: What (if any) features do users combine to achieve their goals and how?
• Page views: What pages/screens do users visit and how long do they spend on these screens?
• Feature usage depth: How deeply do users engage with a feature? Do they, for example, use its advanced settings and customization options?

Clearly, there’s a lot to learn from all of this data.

For example, you can examine your product’s core feature to see how users interact with it. Deep and growing levels of interaction are often a sign of improving product stickiness, while the opposite may indicate potential churn.

User activity across the customer journey

The customer journey unfolds like an adventure. Each digital touchpoint serves as a landmark along the path toward a goal. Specifically, this data captures the user’s complete experience with your product, from beginning to end.

This data tracks the user’s entire experience with your product. It enables you to examine how users navigate from one milestone to the next, where they drop off, and how you can improve the conversion process.

For example, you can conduct funnel analysis to see how new users reach the activation point. This can help you spot friction points and drop-offs in the customer journey.

Other types of customer journey data to track include:

• Onboarding completion rates.
• User retention rates.
• Customer churn rates.
• Customer lifetime value.

In-app user behavior flow data

This data focuses on the sequence of actions users take within your app. It helps you identify their preferred routes, unexpected shortcuts, and even dead ends.

Product teams can conduct flow analysis on different levels to help them improve the app’s user interface and overall user experience.

Userpilot, for example, lets you track user flow via:

• Path analysis: Track user activities as a sequence of events. For example, you can check to see the most common paths users follow to reach a page, or where they go after they leave that page.
• Page analytics: This data provides insights into the performance of individual pages. It can help you identify popular pages and the flow of traffic between pages.
• Customer profile: The user profile page shows you which features individual users regularly interact with. You can dig into their session data to see how they navigate your product.

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How to track in-app user interaction data

Product analytics tools provide three main ways to track user engagement and interactions within your product.

1. Use auto-capture to track in-app engagement

The auto-capture feature is like an omniscient detective that automatically records every user interaction on your app.

With this feature, you no longer need to tag features to have access to data. Autocapture allows you access to your historical event data from Day 1.

When using Userpilot’s auto-capture feature, for example, all you’ll need to do is label core feature events to see them in your reports or analytic dashboards. The feature automatically captures three event groups:

• Clicks: This is triggered every time a user clicks on a UI element. It also captures rage clicks, which could indicate frustration.
• Changes to an input/text area: It tracks changes that users make to text fields as they are linked to specific form input names.
• Form submissions: This event is triggered when a user clicks submit on a form (such as a feedback or sign-up form).

Use session recordings to understand friction

Session recordings are essentially playbacks of a user’s session. Like a digital microscope, they capture everything from mouse movements to clicks, scrolls, and keystrokes.

These recordings provide valuable insight into how users navigate your product and the friction they encounter while using it.

For example, suppose you’ve detected a sudden drop in user activity that has nothing to do with seasonal changes. In that case, you can create a segment of users whose activity levels have dropped in the timeframe. Then, you can filter your session recordings by this segment to understand the problem.

If going through each recording sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. Thankfully, Userpilot lets you skip periods of inactivity in the replay and jump to only active periods. This means shorter, more impactful viewing times as you try to find the problem.

Use heatmaps to track clicks and activity on a page

Heatmaps are your X-ray vision, transforming invisible interactions into vibrant, color-coded landscapes of user engagement. There are three main types of heatmaps for tracking user activity in web applications:

Scrolling heatmaps

Scrolling heatmaps reveal where users focus their attention on a web page. It shows you where they spend the most time.

For example, there are three colors in this example. The top of the page (red) has received the most attention, while the bottom sections (yellow to green) indicate that a significant number of users stopped scrolling.

Click heatmaps

Want to find out which buttons and links are the most popular among your users? Or which areas of your page are driving conversions?

Click heatmaps reveal your users’ click activities. Click popularity is color-coded from red to blue. The most clicked portions are ‘hot’ (red), while the ‘cold’ or blue portions have been clicked the least.

These click maps help you improve your product’s user experience by:

• Visually displaying user engagement data.
• Enabling you to find and track overlooked features or elements.
• Helping you find your dead clicks that induce frustration.

Feature heatmaps

Feature heatmaps are like a diagnostic lens, helping you decode exactly how much users interact with specific features of your product. They’re typically color-coded, with red showing periods of high interactions, and blue indicating less frequent usage.

There are many advantages to this. After launching a new feature, for example, feature heatmaps can help product teams monitor interactions with the feature and track its adoption levels.

How to track user behavior across the customer journey

The customer journey is not a linear path, but a dynamic, multi-dimensional adventure. Let’s now explore three ways you can track user activity across different touchpoints in the user journey.

Track user behavior with custom events

While auto-event tracking generally provides valuable insights into user behavior, custom events help you track specific user activity data by grouping multiple events into one.

For example, you can create a custom event for account setup completion by combining multiple events (such as signup, script installation, and onboarding). This user behavior data can help you identify potential friction points in the user journey.

With Userpilot, you can create custom events with a visual labeler. First, you’ll have to label your auto-captured events. Then, you can group them based on your defined user’s journey.

Use funnel analysis to monitor user activity across the journey

Funnel analysis provides yet another method of tracking user activity in web applications. Here, you define the key steps/milestones in the user journey that lead toward a primary conversion goal.

Then, you can track the number of users who have completed the funnel, see where they drop off, and better identify challenges along the way. You can create these funnels for any of your business conversion goals.

For example, if you’re trying to track the conversion of free trial prospects to paying customers, your funnel could look like this:

1. Sign-up: The user signs up for a free trial.
2. Setup: The user activates their account and starts using the product.
3. Feature adoption: The user adopts key features of the product.
4. Trial expiration: The trial period ends.
5. Upgrade: The user upgrades to a paid subscription.

Once you’ve identified the biggest drop-off areas, you can segment users who dropped off at any point in the funnel and watch their session recordings to determine why they dropped off. With Userpilot, you can even visit individual user profiles to learn more about them.

Set up path reports to see how users navigate in your web applications

Path analysis helps you visualize user actions. It shows you the steps users take both before and after specific events.

Unlike funnel analysis, which shows users’ movement through your specified touchpoints, path analysis shows you the different path possibilities. This can help you understand exactly how users navigate your product.

When paired with funnel analysis, path analysis reveals where users diverge out of the funnel to convert differently. Path analysis can also help you identify or improve your product’s happy path—the ideal, error-free path that users follow to achieve their goals.

Once you identify this path, you can use in-app messages to prompt other users to follow it to reach the desired outcome.

To generate a path report in Userpilot, you’ll need to:

1. Select the path’s starting or ending event.
2. Specify the number of steps you want to map out before or after the event.
3. Pick your conversion criteria, narrowing your analysis to the user or company level.
4. Add your desired filters to narrow the data further.
5. Click on Run Query to generate the path report.

Best user activity tracking tools to monitor user behavior

Even the best methods of tracking users and user behavior will fail without the right tools. With that in mind, let’s explore three of the best user activity-tracking tools in detail.

Userpilot – in-app behavior analytics software for collecting and acting on data

Userpilot is an all-in-one product growth platform that helps product teams increase user adoption, drive feature discovery, and boost engagement.

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It has a ton of features for tracking user activity in web applications, including:

• Autocapture: Userpilot’s auto-capture feature captures ALL user interactions within a product. This includes everything from form submissions to meaningful clicks and text entries. So, when you decide what data is important, simply label the data with the visual labeler and start analyzing.
• Session recordings: Userpilot’s session recordings feature will go live in just a few weeks now (January 2025!). This feature will help product teams monitor users’ behavior by rewatching user sessions. You can even identify a friction point and rewatch related session recordings to understand the problem better.
• Reports and dashboards: Stay on top of your data with Userpilot’s reports and dashboards. You can generate reports for user paths or conversion funnels, or create custom dashboards to track related user activity metrics and events.
• Engagement features: Userpilot has an onboarding layer with several engagement features. As a result, you can act on the insights drawn from tracking user behavior data by creating helpful walkthroughs or sending in-app messages. You can even provide this data-driven support for small, specific user segments.

Hotjar – session replay tool for analyzing user behavior

Hotjar is a visual insights tool that helps you see how users interact with your product with interactive heatmaps and session recordings. It’s a great tool if you want to see and analyze how users interact with your product UI.

With Hotjar UI, you can:

• Record and replay sessions that show mouse movement, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple pages on desktop and mobile applications.
• Combine scroll, move, and click data in heatmaps to enable you to track which parts of your web app receive the most interactions.
• Recognize areas of friction based on dead clicks and rage clicks.
• Identify areas of improvement and optimization opportunities based on user behavior.

Unlike Userpilot, however, you can’t act on the data you collect with Hotjar. It’s strictly an analytics tool.

Google Analytics – website analytics software

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that lets you track user activity on your website. With Google Analytics, you can:

• Collect website traffic data (such as views, sessions, and users).
• Set goals and events to see how users progress toward those goals.
• Monitor user activity on a website and identify drop-off pages and traffic leakage.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not provide detailed insights as it focuses on higher-level activities. It also has a terrible UI with complex features that make for a steep learning curve.

Conclusion

Tracking user activity in web applications helps you make data-informed product improvements. By understanding how users engage with your app, you can recognize and eliminate friction points that hinder progress.

Ready to get started? Get a Userpilot Demo today and see how it drives user activity tracking and turns raw interactions into powerful insights.

Tracking user activity in web applications FAQs

How to track user activity on a web application?

Tracking user activity is simple with the right combination of tools and strategies. You’ll need analytics tools to collect event data, heatmaps and charts to visualize this data, and session recordings to review specific sessions.

How to track user behavior on a website?

User behavior tracking on websites is slightly different, but the tools are similar. Mostly, you’ll need tools to help you track product views, cart additions, purchases, form submissions, and link clicks.

Is it legal to track user activity on a website?

For the most part, yes. However, data privacy laws regulate user activity tracking, and these laws vary by location. To be in the clear, you must be transparent about your practices, obtain user consent, and adhere to the relevant data privacy regulations.

How do I monitor user activity?

To monitor user behavior on your web apps, you need to:

1. Define your goals for user behavior tracking.
2. Select and set up the appropriate tools based on your needs and budget.
3. Define key metrics that matter to your business.
4. Analyze the data you collect to identify trends.
5. Act on the insights you receive.

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