Often you will wonder if your navigational changes have caused visitors to click links more often. You may add related links at the bottom of the page, or put a link right in the middle of the content. Figuring out what links a visitor clicks from the category pages is also helpful.
Thankfully Google Analytics gives you an easy, visual way to do this. First, select a time range via the calendar in the lower left hand corner. Then go to Content Optimization \ Navigational Analysis \ Site Overlay:
You will see a view of your page inside a window. You should notice the address bar, because we can type in any URL of your site, and view the page in an overlay mode. You can also click down through the links on your site, viewing each one in the overlay mode.
I chose to click on the VMware category to see how well it is doing. My VMware articles continue to be some of the most popular on my site, even though there aren’t quite as many of them. Looking at the graphs, I can see a small bar chart that tells me how well each link has done:
You can also click on any of these overlay graphs to see more details about how many people clicked on the link. For this one, I had updated my original vmware tools article with a link to the updated guide for the newer version of vmware. I was wondering if that link helped visitors to get to the right spot.
By clicking on the graph, it expands to show me that in the last week, 202 people have clicked through to the updated guide. I’m glad to know that people are getting to the right place… I don’t want to give out old information!
