Tracking splits in behavior flow for a 'simultaneous' split test?

Question

What do I have?

A category page with multiple product cards such as below.

The (highlighted in blue) thumbnail, title and a sticker on the top right are all clickable, and all lead to the same product page.

What do I want?

A (Behaviour Flow?) report that would show me a breakdown of how many people clicked which part of the product card.

The above is just an example. I can take a pie chart (of the second step), or a bar chart, as long as it maintains how the flows split and then reunite.

What have I found?

• Most of the funnel setups are exclusively one-way, meaning the selection narrows down on every step. So I can have a funnel of either Card → Thumbnail → Product or Card → Title → Product, but not both, together on the same chart.
• I got the advice to look into the Behavior Flow report on Google Analytics, and it seems close, but not exactly the tool for the job, unless I got it all wrong, in which case please advise in which direction do I research it further
• When I Google search for google analytics funnel alternatives, it misunderstands me, and shows the results for Google Analytics alternatives
• When I Google search for google analytics funnel with "split", it thinks I'm looking for a split test, which I'm not because split test implies showing different variants to different audiences, while my variants are presented simultaneously

So instead of a split test, I'm looking for a way to report on the variants presented at the same time. Is this possible with Google Analytics?

(I'm also open to Matomo/Piwik and Yandex.Metrika.)

Answer 1

To accomplish what you want, the best way would probably involve custom JavaScript that is triggered prior to the user moving from the category page to the product page.

Basically, you'd have a listener on the category page that intercepts any click on the elements you're testing. It would then trigger a custom PageView in Analytics, with the relevant title you want and probably a nonsense URL.

Once that PageView has been triggered, the script would then continue the user to their intended destination. This should then inject that step into the behaviour flow report in between the category and the product pages, without the user being any the wiser and it shouldn't have a noticeable effect on performance.

The exact details of the implementation of this does depend on you, particularly whether you'd prefer to work with any JS libraries and exactly how Analytics is implemented on your site. One option would be to do this entirely in GTM, create a trigger for each of the elements you're looking at and a Custom HTML tag for the PageView.

Based on your comment, this would remove any unnecessary clutter in the user's history and since the product page URL is unchanged you won't get false positives from URL sharing or the user back-tracking.