Get to know In-Page Analytics

Welcome back!

Hope you've had a productive week, last time we spoke I chatted about setting up and using Google analytics. Hopefully, you have that up and running on your site now, so I'm going to talk your through one of the features that will help you get a bit more understanding about your site

In Page analytics enables you to see how people are moving around your websites. This is vital in putting together an online strategy as it gives you a very orange and annotated view of what people are clicking on your website, so shows you what people are and aren't engaging with.

This is not only vital in assessing future online strategy, but it also gives you an overview of your current strategy and how it’s working. Are your ‘Call to Actions’ being used, are people dropping off your site on certain pages and what is your ROI? In Page Analytics can be drilled down to 4 key metrics – Clicks, Percentages, Visitors, and viewing filter. It works in the same way as the rest of Google Analytics – you set your date range, you can compare your date ranges and see how your site is comparing to either the previous month, or previous period last year.

It looks a little like this...

This tool, like everything has its pros and cons, the ability to see where people click on the page and follow navigation paths through your site. Although this data has always been available in analytics, it took a lot of digging around and a fair bit of patience.

But, as great as In-Page Analytics can be, it’s not all roses, where it displays a percentage to represent the proportion of visitors to a page who clicked a certain link, it does so by the target url, rather than the actual link. So for example, if your logo links to your homepage and you also have a home button, it will show the same percentage across both of them rather than telling you whether people clicked the logo or the home button most. Whilst not a major issue, this does cut into the tool's usefulness.

So what does In-Page show you?

Well, you can see what are your most and least popular links and understand why people are clicking and how you can fix them, for example:

Links that are receiving a lot of clicks but aren't visible

Make the link more visible:

• If you make the link more visible it is likely it will get even more clicks
• Your users are actively searching out that link, so making it easier to find makes their life easier

Improve the content of the page for that link:

• Why was the link not visible in the first place?
• If the page it links to is not a priority as it doesn't make money or provides poor content then give that page a make-over.
• Make it useful and if possible monetise it.

Links that are visible but aren't getting clicked

Improve the call to action:

• Take a look at your popular links - what makes them successful?
• There has to be a call to action to encourage users to click.

Hide the link:

• What you see as a really important piece of content doesn't do anything for users
• If that content is vital and you need it to be seen, consider how you could direct users to pages differently - links from the pages they're clinking on?

For anyone wanting to see how In-Page works this is the perfect start to get going. If you know any tips to share just drop them in the comments below. I'll be finally getting round to hooking up the Raspberry Pi this week. I have still been looking after Milo so my attention has been elsewhere, so normal service will resume.

'Til the next time
James x