How to record detailed user metrics for a web application?

I'm not sure that “custom metrics” is necessarily the right term to use, but essentially I'm interested in collecting some kinds of data about my users when they browse my site, perhaps only during the private beta.

An example of what interests me, although it does not apply to the web application, is the click tracking used by Mozilla using the Test Pilot. This allowed them to determine, for example, which user interface elements were most important to their users.

Some examples of things I would like to write down:

  • number of clicks on different user interface elements
  • time that users need to complete certain tasks, such as filling out forms
  • the number of times a user submits a form with invalid data, and if they do, which fields are invalid and how they are invalid

Now I could, of course, encode something like that from scratch, but I was wondering if there was any library for this. I use both Rails and jQuery, so everything I use should be compatible, and preferably based on these frameworks.

Unfortunately, having no experience or knowledge of these kinds of things, I was able to find something through Google, but the above Firefox example is closest to the type of things I want to achieve. I also checked various Rails and jQuery sites, but either nothing is there or I lack the correct terminology.

Note. I already know about A / B testing, and this is the closest kind of testing I can find in what I mean, but obviously it is still different.

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3 answers

I would recommend Google Analytics.

We do these things at work, and GA event tracking is pretty much perfect for this. Here's how you use it:

$("#myButton").click(function(){ _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Value']); }); 

Greetings

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Does Google Analytics event tracking do what you want?

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

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Google Analytics , which you probably already know about.

We also used web trends that can dive as deep as you may need.

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