Last Friday, just as we in the UK were all heading home for a well-earned weekend, the Google Analytics team announced a new refinement to its analytics reporting tool: In-Page Analytics. First impressions: it's a start, it's not perfect, but it's brilliant.
Google's In-Page Analytics: So what's new?
Hardened analysts know only too well that Google Analytics (GA) has been able to overlay a certain amount of data on top of the web page under review for quite some time. But it's not been too clever and has become a kind of vaguely cool but neglected oddity in many analytics departments.
In-Page Analytics really starts to make the overlay idea sing and dance. It brings those dry-as-dust numbers to life… enables new patterns and insights to leap off the screen.
That's why we were excited by Friday's announcement of In-Page Analytics. This new feature really starts to make the overlay idea sing and dance. It brings those dry-as-dust numbers to life, and the addition of the hitherto missing spatial element of your data — where people clicked on the page — enables new patterns and insights to leap off the screen.
Taking the customer journey
By combining filters — visitor types, demographics, technical platform, keywords, content — with the In-Page Analytics presentation, you can actually start to retrace the steps taken by those customers as they worked their way through your site. In other words, you're seeing a helicopter view of the customer journey, through the lens of your visitor statistics. We think you'll see some startling things: for example, is it such a good idea to list your products by alphabetical order instead of popularity? (Click image to enlarge.)
There's work to be done
Google's slapped its usual 'Beta' sticker all over this feature, and for good reason: it's early days yet for In-Page Analytics.
For example, for a product with an explicitly spatial presentation focus, GA In-Page Analytics cannot currently distinguish between links at different locations on a page that go to the same destination page. In other words, if you have two links to your home page on a product page — such as the traditional top-left logo click and another one in the page footer — GA In-Page Analytics will report that both links attract the same percentage of clicks — simply because both point to the same page and GA is unable to distinguish between them. This makes In-Page Analytics pretty useless when you try to extract usability insights from the data overlays.
In fact, this problem has dogged the previous release of GA for some time: we've helped clients devise work-arounds to help them understand their analytics better, but it's a problem we'd all like to see the back of. And the GA team promise that they're working on it right now.
Qwerius is tracking GA developments — more on this soon. Meanwhile, here's a video presentation from Google on how In-Page Analytics works.
