In Page Analytics provides nifty visual context for clickpaths
Last month, Google launched a new Analytics feature. It's the shiny new hammer in the Analytics toolbelt. That hammer is In Page Analytics, and it's my new very best friend.
From the Google blog:
In-Page Analytics is a report available from the Content section of your Google Analytics reports. It enables you to visually analyze your website pages in order to assess how users interact with those pages, and helps you understand the answers to questions such as:
- Is my page layout optimal for what I want users to accomplish on the page?
- Are my users seeing the content I want them to see?
- Are my users finding what they're looking for on the page?
- Are my calls to action motivating or visible enough?
- Which links are users clicking?
Let's go find a nail to try out our shiny new hammer, shall we?
That is, with a simple click, the admin can see which menu items and visual elements visitors are clicking on, using percentages in quick visual bubbles for every element on the page. At a glance, designers and marketers can tell exactly which page elements and content are attracting clicks.
At Spoken Communications, we just revamped the corporate website to more closely align with our updated brand message and value proposition. And we took quite a bit of time to create a visual layout that would be both attractive and suggest the most informative path for visitors, according to the relative popularity of each product.
In Page Analytics gives valuable feedback not just on how visitors are using the site but also on the path that the largest percentage of visitors follow. (In the case of Spoken, it provided verification that visitors were following exactly the path we thought they would.)
The information is especially useful for the deeper pages of the site that fewer visitors see; it provides insight as to, two or three pages in, which content is most compelling to visitors. From the second most popular page, the admin can see at a glance which products are getting the most clickthroughs:
A few possibilities I can see for taking advantage of this tool:
- Do split testing with element placement
- Do spolit testing with element colors
- Compare patterns for all visitors versus new visitors
- Compare patterns for visitors from specific popular referral sources
- Compare click traffic for most common keywords
For someone who maintains several content-rich sites, this tool is a gem! No more guessing as to how visitors got to which page and why. No more estimating likely click paths based on general page views. Maybe I'm a little too excited about this, but it gives a busy marketer so much information at a glance that I see this tool not only as a shiny hammer to play with, but also one that is going to give me the information to let me use the nail gun more often.
It's still in beta, but to find In Page Analytics for your account, log in to your Analytics account, click the Content Overview report and then In Page Analytics.Google produced an overview video:
What do you think of this nifty tool?