AWS Solutions Library

Clickstream Analytics on AWS

An end-to-end solution to collect, ingest, analyze, and visualize clickstream data inside your web and mobile applications

Overview

This solution collects, ingests, analyzes, and visualizes clickstreams from your websites and mobile applications. Clickstream data is critical for online business analytics use cases, such as user behavior analysis, customer data platform, and marketing analysis. This data derives insights into the patterns of user interactions on a website or application, helping businesses understand user navigation, preferences, and engagement levels to drive product innovation and optimize marketing investments.

With this solution, you can quickly configure and deploy a data pipeline that fits your business and technical needs. It provides purpose-built software development kits (SDKs) that automatically collect common events and easy-to-use APIs to report custom events, enabling you to easily send your customers’ clickstream data to the data pipeline in your AWS account. The solution also offers pre-assembled dashboards that visualize key metrics about user lifecycle, including acquisition, engagement, activity, and retention, and adds visibility into user devices and geographies. You can combine user behavior data with business backend data to create a comprehensive data platform and generate insights that drive business growth.

Benefits

Accelerate deployment

You can deploy a reliable and scalable data pipeline within minutes instead of weeks to ingest and process billions of clickstream data. You can query this data in near real-time and view out-of-the-box dashboards right away.

Complete data ownership

Clickstream data are available at the finest granularity within the security perimeter of an AWS account. You can query, extract, share, and join the user behavior data for multiple use cases.

Cost effectiveness

This solution is built on top of AWS serverless analytics services that auto scale for your data volume without requiring you to reserve any resources. Also, unlike other third-party solutions, this solution has no license charge, so you pay only for your actual AWS service usage.

Technical details

You can automatically deploy this architecture using the solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.

Clickstream Analytics on AWS | Architecture Diagram

Step 1
Amazon CloudFront distributes the frontend web user interface (UI) assets hosted in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and the backend APIs hosted with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.

Step 2
The Amazon Cognito user pool or OpenID Connect (OIDC) is used for authentication.

Step 3
The web UI console uses Amazon DynamoDB to store persistent data.

Step 4
AWS Step Functions, AWS CloudFormation, Lambda, and Amazon EventBridge orchestrate the lifecycle management of data pipelines.

Step 5
The data pipeline is provisioned based on the configurations specified by the user in the web console. It consists of Application Load Balancer (ALB), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon S3, Amazon EMR Serverless, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight.