# An end-to-end guidance to collect, ingest, analyze, and visualize clickstream data inside your web and mobile applications
<a name="solution-overview"></a>

 The Clickstream Analytics on AWS guidance allows you to collect, ingest, process and analyze clickstream data from websites and mobile applications to drive your business growth. You can use the guidance to spin up an analytics platform that fits your organizational needs, and maintain complete ownership and control over your valuable user behavior data. The solution can be applied to various use cases such as user behavior analysis and marketing analysis to improve website and application's performance. 

 The guidance provides modularized and configurable components of a data pipeline so that you can choose and customize the components to accelerate the building of a Well-Architected data pipeline from weeks to minutes. The purpose-built SDKs and guidance allow you to collect client-side data from different application platforms (for example, Android, iOS, and JavaScript) to AWS. In addition, ready-to-use dashboards and explorative analytics studio enable you to derive actionable business insights easily and quickly. 

![\[AWS solution overview showing data flow from clickstream to business insights using various services.\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/clickstream-analytics-on-aws/images/solution-overview.png)


Use this navigation table to quickly find answers to these questions: 


|  If you want to …  |  Read…  | 
| --- | --- | 
|  Know the cost for running this guidance  |  [Cost](cost.md)  | 
|  Understand the security considerations for this guidance  |  [Security](security-1.md)  | 
|  Know which AWS Regions are supported for this guidance  |  [Supported AWS Regions](supported-aws-regions.md)  | 
|  Get started with the guidance quickly to build an end-to-end data pipeline, send data into the pipeline, and then view the ready-to-use dashboards  |  [Getting started](getting-started.md)  | 
|  Learn the concepts related to pipeline, and how to manage a data pipeline throughout its lifecycle  |  [Pipeline management](pipeline-management.md)  | 
|  Practice how to customize analytics dashboard in an intuitive manner | [Analytics studio](analytics-studio.md) | 

 This guide is intended for IT architects, developers, DevOps, data analysts, and marketing technology professionals who have practical experience architecting in the AWS Cloud. 

# Features and benefits
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 The guidance includes the following key features and benefits: 
+  **Visual data pipeline builder** 

  You can simply define the data pipeline from a web-based UI console. The guidance will take care of the underlying infrastructure creation, required security setup, and data integrations. Each pipeline module is built with various features and designed to be loosely-coupled, making it flexible for you to customize for specific use cases. 
+  **Purpose-built SDKs** 

  The SDKs are optimized for collecting data from Android, iOS, and JavaScript platforms, which automatically collect common events (for example, first visit, screen view), support built-in local cache, retry, and verification mechanisms to ensure high completeness of data transmission. 
+  **Out-of-the-box dashboard** 

  The guidance offers a dozen of built-in visualizations (for example, acquisition, engagement, retention, and user demographic) and exploratory reporting templates (for example, user details, event details), powering various critical business analytics use cases such as user behavior analytics, marketing analytics, and product analytics. 

# Use cases
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 Clickstream data play a pivotal role in numerous online business analytics use cases, and the Clickstream Analytics on AWS can be applied to the following: 
+  **User behavior analytics** 

  Clickstream data in user behavior analytics provides insights into the sequential and chronological patterns of user interactions on a website or application, helping businesses understand user navigation, preferences, and engagement levels to enhance the overall product experience and drive product innovation. 
+  **First-party customer data platform (CDP)** 

  Clickstream data, together with other business data sources (for example, order history, and user profile), allow customers to create a first-party customer data platform that offers a comprehensive view of their users, enabling businesses to personalize customer experiences, optimize customer journeys, and deliver targeted marketing messages. 
+  **Marketing analytics** 

  Clickstream data in marketing analytics offers detailed information about users' click paths and interactions with marketing campaigns, enabling businesses to measure campaign effectiveness, optimize marketing strategies, and enhance conversion rates. 

# Terms and concepts
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This section describes key concepts and defines terminology specific to this guidance:

 **Project** 

A project in this solution is the top-level entity, like a container, that groups your apps and data pipeline for collecting and processing clickstream data. One project contains one data pipeline, and can have one or more apps registered to it. 

 **Data pipeline** 

A data pipeline is deployed into one AWS region, which means all the underlining resources are created in one AWS region. A data pipeline in this solution contains four modules: 
+ **Ingestion server**: a web service that provides an endpoint to collect data through HTTP requests, and sink the data in streaming services or S3.
+ **Data processing**: a module that transforms raw data to the solution schema and enriches data with additional dimensions.
+ **Data modeling**: a module that aggregates data to calculate metrics for business analytics.
+ **Reporting**: a module that creates metrics and out-of-the-box visualizations in QuickSight.

 **App** 

An app in this guidance can represent an application in your business, which might be built on one or multiple platforms (for example, Android, iOS, and Web). 

 **Analytics Studio** 

Analytics Studio is a web console for business or data analysts to view dashboards, query, and manage clickstream data. 

Below is a diagram to help you better understand those concepts and their relationship with each other in the AWS context.

![\[alt text not found\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/clickstream-analytics-on-aws/images/concepts.png)


For a general reference of AWS terms, see the [AWS glossary](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/glos-chap.html) in the *AWS General Reference*.