Before, we had the site overlay report in Google Analytics. This report displayed the percentage of clicks, transactions and goals for standard links within a page. The past 15 of October, the site overlay report was replaced in GA with then new In-page Analytics. The site overlay report was a great tool to do click density analysis and was very useful for those who had to do analysis of websites that rarely use. In other words it was great to facilitate the work of agencies who have to analyse data from different customers. However, the report was missing lots of features. Google has improved Site overlay in different ways helping out people to understand two things: the performance of a page better and how visitors are using the page in a website.
The main reason for using In - page Analytics is to keep the visual context that can not be kept when using the navigation report. My recommendation is:
- Look at the link with bigger percentage of clicks, this percentage is displayed inside bubbles
.After you have done that, look at the statistic information that these links are giving you. For instance, percentage of transactions, revenue, goal value and number of goals completed.
- Ask yourself if the links most people are clicking are the links you want that people actually click on. Believe me, you can find surprises (like most of your visitors clicking on the help tab or in a link you never thought).
NOTE: When doing your analysis be careful with some things within the In-page report. If you see dotted bubbles 
, it means that the page has more than one link to the same url. In-page Analytics makes easier to identify where are the other links to the same destination highlighting (in gray) them when you look at the statistic information of the dotted bubbled.
, it means that the page has more than one link to the same url. In-page Analytics makes easier to identify where are the other links to the same destination highlighting (in gray) them when you look at the statistic information of the dotted bubbled.- Follow the links to see what people do after they reach the next page. One of the greatest features added to this report is that in the left side of the report you can see not only the content details stats for that page, but also the list of inbound and outbound sources. Therefore, you are able to know from where the visitors have been driven to this page and where are they going after.
You could also check out traffic information filtering by visitor type, city, region, referrals, campaigns and technical data as well. And if the filters are not enough, you can apply advanced segments to this report. What is this useful for? Let’s say that you send an email campaign promoting a specific product. You could compare referrals from that campaign with the rest of the visitors and check if the behaviour is similar or not.
Personally, I think the In-page Analytics reports is a great feature, but it’s not perfect. You need to be careful with dynamic links or buttons within a form which the information is not displayed in this report. Therefore do not make assumptions about the performance of your forms using this feature.
Also, it will be very useful to see where people are clicking even when there’s not a link present. This is very useful to identify when images are confused with links and will give you powerful tools to improve the performance of your landing pages. So, enjoy playing with the In-page Analytics and take the most of it as it is at the moment.
