Clicked or tapped conversion metrics | LaunchDarkly

This topic explains how to create a clicked or tapped metric for use in LaunchDarkly experiments, guarded rollouts, or release policies.

Clicked or tapped metrics track how often an end user interacts with an element of your product’s UI. For example, you can use clicked or tapped metrics to track:

How often a customer clicks a “Save” button when it is red, versus how often a customer clicks the “Save” button when it is blue
How often a customer clicks the same “Save” button across different URLs by tracking URLs based on substrings or simple matches

Clicked or tapped events are different from session replay click properties

LaunchDarkly’s observability features include a session replay plug-in that automatically tracks user clicks during a session recording. You can use the session replay click properties (clickSelector, clickContextContent, and clickTarget) to filter the sessions displayed in the Sessions tab of the LaunchDarkly UI. However, you cannot use those properties as events for creating new metrics.

This topic describes how to instrument clicked or tapped events and metrics that you can use to create experiments or guarded rollouts.

Prerequisites

Clicked or tapped metrics are only compatible with the following JavaScript-based client SDKs:

Electron
JavaScript
Node.js (client-side)
React Web
Vue

If you do not use one of these SDKs and would like to track clicks or taps, use a custom conversion binary metric instead.

Flush events when an end user is redirected

SDKs send events at regular intervals, such as every five seconds. If a browser redirects an end user to another page, any events that occurred between when the SDK last sent events and when the browser redirected will be lost. To avoid this, flush events when you know the browser will redirect an end user to another page, such as on click. To learn more, read Flushing events.

CSS selectors

CSS selectors designate specific areas of your product UI, like buttons or images, that your end users can interact with. You can create a metric that monitors interaction with one or more CSS selectors.

For example, some CSS selectors include:

#example-element-id
.example-classname
button.example-button
.example-button, .example-button-alt

The CSS selector must be present in your application after the end user interacts with it in order for LaunchDarkly to record the metric. For example, if the end user clicks an element that is dynamically removed from your application in response to the click, then LaunchDarkly will not record the metric event.

If the CSS selector will not be present after the end user interacts with it, we recommend using a custom conversion binary metric instead. To learn more, read Custom conversion binary metrics.

Metric definition

When you create a clicked or tapped conversion metric, you first choose the metric aggregation type:

Count uses sum aggregation to measure the total number of times a context clicks a target.
Count distinct units (Percent) uses average aggregation to measure whether or not a context clicks a target. This option automatically sets the metric analysis type to average, to measure the percent of units that click a target for a given flag variation.

If you aggregate using the Count option, you must also choose the metric analysis method:

Average: the default Average analysis method calculates the average number of clicks per context for a given flag variation. For metrics you plan to use in funnel metric groups, you must select “Average.”
Percentile: you can choose between P50-P99, which represent the 50th through the 99th percentile. This method counts the clicks per context, then finds the number of clicks that fall into the chosen percentile.

If you choose Count distinct units (Percent), the metric definition automatically uses the “Average” analysis method.

To learn more about the metric definition options, read Analysis method and Analysis units.

Create clicked or tapped metrics

To create a clicked or tapped metric:

Open the Data section and navigate to the Metrics list.
Click Create metric. The “Create metric” dialog appears.
If you use warehouse native metrics, you can select either LaunchDarkly hosted or Warehouse native. Select LaunchDarkly hosted.
Select an event kind of Clicked or tapped.
Enter one or more CSS selectors in the Click target(s) field. If you include multiple CSS selectors, separate them with commas.
Specify the Target type you want to track behavior on. Expand the section below to view the four types of URL matching.

Expand URL matching options

URL matching schema	Description	Example
Simple match	This sends an event when the end user accesses a URL, or clicks on an element hosted at a URL, that matches the string you enter in the Target URL field or a formulation of that URL that included appended parameters. If you want events to record for URLs with substrings, specify each URL individually.	If you specify: `https://www.example.com` Then LaunchDarkly sends events from views or clicks at: `https://www.example.com` `https://www.example.com#signin` If you specify: `https://www.example.com`, and `https://www.example.com/login` Then LaunchDarkly sends events from views or clicks at: `https://www.example.com` `https://www.example.com/login`
Exact match	This sends an event when the end user accesses a URL, or clicks on an element hosted at a URL, that exactly matches what you enter in the Target URL field. Identical base URLs with different substrings do not send events.	If you specify: `https://www.example.com` Then LaunchDarkly sends events from views or clicks at: `https://www.example.com` Views and clicks at `https://www.example.com/login` and `https://www.example.com#signin` do not send events.
Regular expression	This sends an event based on a regex expression you specify. This lets you designate more precise locations to send click and page view events.	If you specify: `example.com\/account\/.*\/billing` Then LaunchDarkly sends events from views or clicks at any string between `account/` and `/billing`, such as `http://example.com/account/12345/billing`. You can test your regular expressions using the tool at Regular Expressions 101.
Substring match	This sends an event when the end user accesses a URL, or clicks on an element hosted at a URL with a specific string of text in it.	If you specify: `https://www.example.com` Then LaunchDarkly sends events from views or clicks at: `https://www.example.com/abc` `https://www.example.com/def/ghi` If you specify: `your-substring` Then LaunchDarkly sends events from views or clicks at: `example.com/your-substring` `example.com/username/your-substring/` `example.com/your-substring/settings` Because all of these URLs contain `your-substring`, clicks on the CSS selectors you specify on each page send events.

Enter the full URL or search pattern in Target URL.
(Optional) Click Add target URL to track clicks on more than one URL target.
In the Metric definition section, choose either Count or Count distinct units (Percent) from the drop-down menu to configure the aggregation type. The window populates a full metric definition using default values.
Use the [analysis unit] drop-down menu to change or add analysis units. For clicked or tapped metrics, the analysis unit will usually default to “user,” “customer,” or similar, representing an individual person.
If you chose Count as the aggregation type, choose either Average or a percentile between P50-P99 click rate to specify the metric analysis method.

A clicked or tapped conversion metric.
Enter a metric Name.
(Optional) Add a Description.
(Optional) Add any Tags.
(Optional) Update the Maintainer.
Click Create.

You can connect the metric to an experiment or guarded rollout to monitor the impact of a flag change. You can also filter the metric events to specific context attributes or event properties.

You can also use the REST API: Create metric