The idea behind clickstreams is that researchers can learn a great deal about user activity and psychology derived from how and where users click on a website.

For example, an e-commerce website may include central product areas, sidebars, banner ads and other elements on a single page. Clickstreams allow marketers and other researchers to gain insight about website user interests and activity. Clickstream monitoring reveals user success rates and may be used to monitor employee productivity.

Certain tools render visual clickstream monitoring from a data set. For example, Hadoop is used to refine and present clickstream data.

Marketers routinely study advanced features that combine basic clickstream data with other valuable customer data in an attempt to understand how customers think, thus building sites and resources that are more tailored to different users.