Google Analytics – Find out what your visitors are clicking on.

Firstly, I suppose I should answer the question – Why is it important to know where your visitors are clicking?

Well, if it’s not immediately obvious, let me tell you one way I have used this information this week. 

I put up a new page on my site (it’s an affiliate site built with WordPress) and that page was soon getting 20 – 30 visitors a day.  It’s the kind of page that should attract targeted visitors who would probably be interested in other pages on my site and therefore be exposed to other offers on the site, so this page should be “feeding” other pages on my site with tageted traffic.

But where exactly were visitors going after arriving at the page?  Well Google Analytics helped answer that question.  Using Analytics, I was able to see that 9.7% of people leaving the page, were doing so via a “and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!” link in the comments section. This link was included in the theme for my WordPress site, and that link opened in the same window.  Bang – 9.7% visitors lost to another site.  In fact, I just checked on my this site, on a WordPress tutorial post, and 11% of people are clicking the exact same Gravatar link (I am using a similar template on this site).  If you are using one of the Revolution templates, you probably have this problem as well.  I have just created a WordPress tutorial to show how you can remove this Gravatar distraction if you want to.

Let me show you how I found this information.

Login to your Analytics account, and select the correct project.

In the  menu on the left, select Content:

Once the page loads, scroll to the bottom, and click the Full Report Link:

Again, when the page loads, scroll to the bottom.  You will now find a search box.  Type in a word that is contained in the URL that you are interested in investigating, and click Go.  A list of pages on your site that contain that word will be listed.  Click the link to the page you are interested in.  Mine is the first one in the list:

When you click on the page link, a new screen opens, showing you some options that relate to just that page:

Click on the link to the Site Overlay.  A new screen will open showing you your webpage, with a click map overlaid on top.  This shows you where people are clicking.  Here is the top of the page I am interested in:

.. and here is the bottom, showing the problematic “Gravatar” link.

That’s 28 clicks on this Gravatar link, representing 11% of visitors.  Considering the page in question has only got one comment, it looks like a common way that people are leaving my site.  Its a distraction that needs to be removed.

Over in the WordPress Tutorials section, I have written a tutorial to show Revolution Template users how to remove the Gravatar link.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

 Print This Post

Related Articles

• Is WordPress the ideal site building tool? - WordPress may be the ideal site building tool. This article explores some of the reasons I think that, and shows you a video of some results I have obtained using WordPress for my affiliate sites. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook Buzz it up Buzz it up share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it Subscribe to the comments
• Using .htaccess file for affiliate link redirects - Using the htaccess file to handle affiliate links has a number of benefits. Here we show you how easy it is to implement. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook Buzz it up Buzz it up share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Adding RSS Feeds to Your Web Site Using Carp - Adding ever-changing content of any kind to your site is a good thing. Reasons include: Pages that change regularly are seen as fresh by the search engines, which brings the search bots back to your site more frequently, and possibly help your site rank better. Visitors will come back if your page content changes often. New, current content for
• Changing File Permissions Using Filezilla - Often when you need to install a script on your server, the instructions require you to change Permissions on a file.  This may sound complicated but really is very simple. Login to your site using the Filezilla “Client”. Right click the file or directory that you want to change permissions on:   The following screen will appear: On
• Different ways of finding theme words for LSI - Two methods to find theme words for any article, keeping LSI in mind. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook Buzz it up Buzz it up share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it Subscribe to the comments on this post