Clickstream

What Does Clickstream Mean?

A clickstream is a record that contains data about a website user’s clicks on a computer display screen via a mouse or touchpad. This type of information provides a visual trail of user activity with detailed feedback.

Techopedia Explains Clickstream

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.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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