Wouldn’t it be great if you could see where your site visitors are clicking on the page? Is your call-to-action working? Is your main navigation being clicked on or is it hardly being used? If you are using Google Analytics, then let me introduce you to the site overlay report.

The site overlay report will show you the percentage of clicks each link on the page receives. One thing to note is the default set up will show you the percentage of clicks each link destination receives. If you have two links on the page that lead to the same destination the percentage shown is based on the cumulative number of times both links were clicked on. Both links will show the same percentage, not the percentage each individual link was clicked. An example of this would be having a link to your “about us” page in both your main navigation and your footer navigation. The percentage will be based on the total number of times the “about us” links were clicked on.

Take it a Step Further

If you would like to view the percentage each link was clicked on by themselves instead of grouping them with other links on the page, you will need to add some parameters to the end of your links. Let’s use the example of linking to your “about us” page again. If your links look like this currently, /aboutus.html, you will need to add parameters to the end of the link such as /aboutus.html?nav for the main navigation and /aboutus.html?footer for the footer navigation. It doesn’t matter what you use for the parameters as long as it will make sense to you when you are viewing your reports.

One word of caution. By adding parameters to the end of your links you will alter your top content reports. You will now have three separate pages for your about us page.

• aboutus.html
• aboutus.html?nav
• aboutus.html?footer

You will need to decide if the additional detail you gain in your site overlay report is worth the extra confusion you will have in your top content report. You will also want to add any altered versions of the original link to your robots.txt file telling the search engines to not index these versions of the page. If you skip this last step you could end up with duplicate content issues.

How do you use the site overlayreport to improve your websites performance? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Suggested Reading

[amazonshowcase_83123aa625a3cb9c0294f0b641eeb3f3]

Click image to buy.