How to Track CTA Clicks in PostHog with Autocapture

PostHog gives you two ways to track CTA clicks: autocapture, which records every click automatically with the element's text, and named custom events, which are stable and unambiguous. Use autocapture to discover what people click, and custom events to measure the CTAs you actually care about.

Option A: Read clicks straight from autocapture

With autocapture on, every click is an $autocapture event and the button's visible text lands in $el_text. This HogQL ranks your most-clicked elements over 30 days — no instrumentation required:

SELECT
  properties.$el_text AS label,
  count() AS clicks,
  countDistinct(person_id) AS people
FROM events
WHERE event = '$autocapture'
  AND properties.$event_type = 'click'
  AND properties.$el_text != ''
  AND timestamp > now() - INTERVAL 30 DAY
GROUP BY label
ORDER BY clicks DESC
LIMIT 15

Illustrative sample output:

label	clicks	people
Start free trial	1,240	1,090
See how it works	510	470
Pricing	360	330

Instantly you can see which CTA wins attention. The catch: this is keyed on the literal text, so the day you rename "Start free trial" to "Get started," the history splits.

Option B: Fire a named custom event for the CTAs that matter

For your primary CTA, add a stable event that survives copy changes:

<a
  href="/signup"
  onClick={() => posthog.capture('cta_clicked', { location: 'hero', label: 'start_trial' })}
>
  Start free trial
</a>

Now cta_clicked with location: 'hero' is unambiguous and independent of the button text. This is the event you put in funnels and dashboards.

Compute click-through rate

Combine the click event with the pageview to get a real CTR for the homepage hero CTA:

SELECT
  countDistinctIf(person_id, event = '$pageview'
    AND properties.$pathname = '/') AS viewers,
  countDistinctIf(person_id, event = 'cta_clicked'
    AND properties.location = 'hero') AS clickers,
  round(
    countDistinctIf(person_id, event = 'cta_clicked'
      AND properties.location = 'hero')
    / countDistinctIf(person_id, event = '$pageview'
      AND properties.$pathname = '/') * 100,
  2) AS ctr_pct
FROM events
WHERE timestamp > now() - INTERVAL 30 DAY

Illustrative sample output:

viewers	clickers	ctr_pct
6,180	412	6.67

Use them together

Autocapture is your zero-effort discovery layer — run Option A periodically to see what's pulling clicks you didn't expect. Custom events are your measurement layer — stable names you can trust in funnels and over time. Pair CTA clicks with a cta_seen event (from an IntersectionObserver) and you can tell apart "nobody sees it" from "they see it but don't click."