Google Analytics, UX analysis and a faster mouse click rate which deserves the Guinness World Record

How fast can you type? How fast can your website visitors interact with your website? Can Google Analytics catch up with them and record every mouse click inside your page or form element? It's a good idea to know your limits and the limits of the tools we are working with on a daily basis.

Technical limits (or features) of Google Analytics JavaScript:

• During first second, GA will accept 20 hits (events) and each consequent second two more hits. Everything above will be ignored (not sent)
• If you send 20 hits, wait for 10 seconds and send 20 more - all hits will be registered in Google Analytics and you will be able to report on them
• If you need to send for example, 50 events, they can be sent as fast as in16 seconds: 20 sent in the first second and the remaining 30 during 15 seconds
• A single page cannot send more than 500 hits to GA until it gets reloaded. This hardcoded limit makes sense as Google analytics will only accept 500 hits per session

According to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nX4NSHlb0Y we can expect 15.5 clicks per second max. You can challenge yourself here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/wolfups/how-fast-can-you-click

Have you beaten the Guinness World Record? :)

That's very fast clicking and those are all clicks into a single point on the page which is not what we are interested in. Users think when they click and will click into different areas of the screen, understanding what they are doing without trying to beat the Guinness World Record. Doing it this way is slower: 5..10 times slower, generating numbers which GA is able to process.

Limits apply to both Free and Analytics 360 (Premium) versions. These limits are dictated not only by Google Analytics processing capacity, but by website visitors' browser/computer performance - they simply may not be able to send that many requests per second.

Collecting webpage user interactions is very important because we want to know what our website visitors did on the website: what information they ignored, what they read, and where they clicked. This is one of the approaches offered by Internetrix with our Government Analytics solution .