Google Analytics & Clerk.io: Usage

A breakdown of the differences in usage data for Search & Recommendations

Google Analytics (“GA”) is one of the most popular tools used among website owners.

Many eCommerce owners use this tool to track important metrics, such as pageviews, searches, conversion rates, ROI of paid advertising and so on.

It is then natural to try comparing the data provided by GA with the data calculated by Clerk.io, especially regarding Clerk.io’s product usage

However, the two tools are meant to measure different metrics with different calculation logics.

This article focuses on explaining why the metrics in GA will not match the ones in your Clerk.io’s account.

The video below summarizes the points in this article:

The main differences in the way the 2 tools measure the number of searches are:

  • Clerk.io measures searches related to both the Instant Search and the Search Page.
  • GA measures only searches where the customer loads the Search Page (which means after pressing Enter or clicking on “View more results”), since it is able to measure only based on page changes. All Searches made in the Instant Search are therefore excluded by the calculations. Moreover, also multiple searches on the same keyword during the same session are excluded

Recommendations

The main differences in the way the 2 tools measure pageview and recommendations usage are:

  • Clerk.io is based on the number of recommendation banners installed on each page. For example if your product page has 1.000 views per month and you have installed 2 of Clerk.io’s recommendation banners, your monthly usage for the product page will be 1.000 x 2 = 2.000 views per month. The usage does count reload of the same page within the same session
  • GA does not consider the number of recommendation banners installed. Moreover, the number of pageviews itself can differ from Clerk.io since GA’s tracking script is often blocked by ad blockers while Clerk.io is not.

More information on how Clerk.io measures the usage can be found in this article

More information on the specific metrics found in Clerk.io and GA can be found below.

Clerk.io

Search dashboard

  • Total visitors → the number of total visitor IDs tracked within a given time period. A new visitor ID is assigned dynamically based on how often the visitor comes back – when there is no visitor ID we generate a new one.
  • % of your visitors uses search while shopping → how many visitors have used Clerk.io’s Live Search or Search Page out of the total visitors
  • Total number of Searches → number of total searches made by visitors within a given time period that returns products

Recommendations dashboard

Views for each recommendation slider: every time the page/the pages containing the slider are loaded. It does count a reload of the same page within the same session.

Usage Dashboard

Search Usage: may be higher than the Clerk.io’s Total Number of Searches since it includes additional elements returned by Clerk.io (such as categories, blog pages and suggestions) and interactions with Facets.

If you need any further help or have any questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.