Knowing the paths your website visitors are following on your site is invaluable. One can identify visitor navigational trends, what content is attracting the most attention and areas within your site that are lacking in visitor interest/traffic. Google Analytic’s site overlay feature tells you just this, giving you the power to understand how users are navigating your site.

In Google Analytics, this function can be found by clicking on the Content/Site Overlay button within the interface.  When clicked, a view of your website interface will load in a new window and percentages will appear next to each link on the page. These percentages represent the fraction of people clicking the given link over the time period you have chosen. Furthermore, if you hover over a percentage, a pop up will appear detailing the exact number of visitors who clicked through the link.  The amount of visitors who have completed any pre-set goals (converted) for that page will also appear if applicable. For example, if, in Google Analytics, you define visitors filling out the Contact Us form on your site as a goal, the site overlay will list the number of visitors who have completed that goal.

Depending on what you see in the site overlay, you may choose to either completely change the content on your site, or, simply rearrange the order of pages to help increase traffic to your most valuable Web content.

At Rise, we used the site overlay to do just that. We saw that our visitors seemed to be going to the pages on the left-hand side of the navigation the most, as well as the top pages listed on our drop-down menu. Originally, we had designed our site so our services, for example, were listed in alphabetical order. When we saw visitors were clicking on the first few pages in that drop-down, we decided to re-organize the order, listing the services in the highest demand first.

The site overlay function in Google Analytics is an indispensible tool every Web master should be aware of. Not only does it give you great insight into your Web visitor’s navigational patterns and tell you what pages they are browsing the most, but it also provides the data in one simple mouse click.  A tool that is this easy (not to mention free), should not go unnoticed.

Tags: Google Analytics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.