Understanding where your visitors go

Analytics and flow – Always be testing.

Obviously, crafting a great UX for your site will help enormously with conversions.

And it’s easier than you think. There are lots of proprietary solutions out there, but sometimes simpler is better. And that’s what Google Analytics can offer via it’s In Page Analytics.

If you’ve built your site correctly then you’ll have all the correct Google tags to enable it to track activity at the link level on your site. Once you’re up and running it’s simply a case of installing a simple plugin to the browser and voila! Every click link on every page of your site is revealed in all it’s glory.

It provides a whole wealth of information for those looking for a visual assessment of how visitors interact with every one of your pages. It is particularly useful to establish if your layout and content is engaging visitors as you’d want them to.

Here is the map for our home page:

Who clicks where

Some (but not all) of the data is very useful – in our case the following is useful to understand, and then tailor the content and layout accordingly:

  • Both “What we do” and “Contact” are by far an away the most popular top-level clicks. News is not popular, and eats the most amount of resource so we’ll change that to “Blog” and see if that gets more clicks!
  • Cleverness” gets four times the click volume compared to “WordPress Agency” despite their proximity so we should make more the the popular link.
  • No-one seems to be bothered that we’ve got offices in London, Yorkshire and the South-East so maybe we can stop putting the links there.

A good website strategy requires good information that is accessible and usable – and in a world where you should always be testing, it’s invaluable.