Activity Map Overview

A product manager is redesigning the homepage. There are three calls to action on it: a large button in the hero image, a text link halfway down, and an offer in the footer. She wants to know which one people actually use before she removes two of them.

The page report says the homepage had 400,000 views last month. That is the only number it has. It knows people arrived, it knows what they looked at next, and it has nothing at all to say about which of the three things they pressed.

The information exists. Every one of those clicks was a real event in a browser. It is just that nothing recorded which element it happened on.

The report knows the page, not the button

Adobe Analytics counts hits, and a hit tells you where somebody went. The next page view proves they left the homepage and arrived at the product page. It does not tell you which of the four routes to that product page they took.

You can capture that yourself. Link Tracking covers exactly how, and it works perfectly. The problem is not capability, it is arithmetic. A large site has tens of thousands of links, and instrumenting each one means naming it, deciding which variable it goes into, and maintaining that as the site changes. Nobody has ever finished doing this. Teams instrument the twenty links somebody asked about and leave the rest dark.

So the practical situation on most sites is that a handful of links are measured deliberately and everything else is invisible, and the question the product manager asked falls into the invisible part.

It names every link for you, automatically

Activity Map solves that by turning the problem around. Instead of asking you to name links in advance, it looks at whatever was clicked and works out a name from the page itself.

When somebody clicks, the code examines the element. If it is a link with text in it, the text becomes the name. If it is a button, its label becomes the name. If it is an image with an alt attribute, that is used. Then it records where on the page it was, by reading the id of the surrounding element.

All of that travels along with the next tracking call, and it lands in four dimensions.

That is the whole idea, and it is a good one. The cost of measuring a link drops to zero, so every link is measured, including the ones nobody thought to ask about until today.

It is not a heatmap

The word people reach for is heatmap, and the tools they are thinking of are ones like Hotjar or Crazy Egg. Activity Map is not one of those, and the difference matters when somebody asks it a question it cannot answer.

It does not follow the mouse. It does not know where attention went, which parts of the page were read, or how long anybody looked at anything. It does not record clicks on things that are not links, so an unclickable headline that everybody stares at produces nothing.

What it records is clicks, on elements it can identify, and nothing else. The visual overlay is coloured by click volume, which looks like a heatmap and is a ranked list of links wearing colour.

The overlay is the shop window, not the product

Almost everybody meets Activity Map as the browser overlay: you install an extension, open your site, and the numbers appear on top of the page. It demonstrates well, it is genuinely useful for showing a stakeholder something, and it is the reason most people think of this as a separate tool.

It is not a separate tool. The four dimensions above are ordinary Adobe Analytics dimensions. They sit in the components list in Analysis Workspace next to everything else. You can put Activity Map Link in a freeform table, break it down by anything, segment it, apply attribution to it, and build a calculated metric on it. The overlay reads those same dimensions and draws them on a page.

Which means the analytically valuable half of Activity Map has nothing to do with the overlay, and most teams never touch it. They install the extension, look at a page, and never once put the dimension into a report where it could be compared, trended or broken down.

Follow along: use it without the overlay

Ten minutes, no extension, no permissions beyond ordinary Workspace access. This is the half most people never see.

Free measurement, with a narrow question

Page reports count arrivals and cannot say which element produced them. Instrumenting every link by hand is possible and nobody finishes it, so most links on most sites are dark. Activity Map fills that in by deriving a name from whatever was clicked and recording it in four dimensions, at no implementation cost per link.

It answers a narrow question well. It counts clicks on things it can identify. It does not track attention, mouse movement, or anything that was seen but not pressed, and it cannot give you a rate without a denominator you supply.

The overlay is how the feature is usually demonstrated and it is the smaller half. The dimensions are ordinary dimensions, they work in Workspace with segments, breakdowns, trends and conversion metrics, and Web SDK implementations keep all of that while losing the overlay entirely.

All of which assumes the names arriving in those dimensions are worth reading. That is not automatic. The quality of every Activity Map report is decided by whether Adobe could work out a sensible name for the thing that was clicked, and on a lot of sites it cannot. Implementation and Setup covers how the name is derived, what to do when the derived name is useless, and the elements it does not track at all.