Using Google’s In-Page Analytics to understand how people use a site

Posted: - Modified: | blogging, wordpress

If you use Google Analytics to get some insight into how people use your webpages, be sure to check out Content > In-Page Analytics. It gives you an idea of what people click on, and that can influence your design decisions.

The posts on my blog homepage change roughly every week, so I used the drop-down in the top right to change the reporting date. Here’s what the overall stats look like for the main page of my blog:

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Let’s look at the breakdown throughout the page:

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It looks like I should spend some time improving my About page, since a lot of people go to it.

2013-05-31 11_40_19-In-Page Analytics - Google AnalyticsSome blogs recommend removing the Recent Comments widget from the sidebar because people don’t find it useful. I find it handy for seeing what people are talking about, though, and it seems that other people do too. (21% of clicks to see older comments!) I switched to using the Better WordPress Recent Comments plugin in order to show comment previews. There’s a slight delay because I’m using the external Disqus commenting system which still needs to synchronize with WordPress, but I like it overall.

2013-05-31 11_40_37-In-Page Analytics - Google AnalyticsSome blogs recommend manually selecting Top Posts & Pages instead of leaving it up to the computer. This one is automatically selected based on recent views, which is great because it comes up with recommendations I wouldn’t have remembered or thought about (like that Drupal one!). I should make a Resources page, though.

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I include links to blog posts in my weekly reviews. This is surprisingly useful for both personal memory-jogging and for helping other people jump to things quickly.

2013-05-31 11_41_15-In-Page Analytics - Google Analytics

I have a hard time getting the hang of “Next page” and “Previous page” navigation on blogs. (Am I going forward or backward in time?) I changed my theme to make it easier to figure out which direction you’re going in, and I have these paging links at the beginning (near a table of contents) and at the end of the page.

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This is all the way near the bottom of the page.  It has the same numbers as the ones up top, so I think Google Analytics might be getting confused about the links because they go to the same place.  (Same with the Older Posts link.) I can probably disambiguate the links by changing the tracking code.

So, TODOs for me: spruce up my About page, figure out where to add a Resources page, look into asynchronous tracking, and see if there’s a way I can set up WordPress to experiment with different layouts…

Check out Google’s In-Page Analytics if you have it on your site!

Note: Got an error while trying to use In-Page Analytics? Make sure you’re properly calling the Google Analytics code on the site. I use a Wordpress plugin to make sure that my visits aren’t tracked when I’m logged in (no sense in throwing off the stats with obsessive refreshing! Winking smile ), so I needed to log out of my site before checking In-Page Analytics.

You can comment with Disqus or you can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.