Good news for anyone who likes to use In-Page Analytics – a feature of Google Analytics. This is the feature that lets you look at your web page with click-through statistics overlayed on the page.
If you aren’t sure how to use this feature, go to your website profile in Google Analytics, expand the Content tab on the left menu and then you will see the In-Page Analytics option.
The problem with this feature to date has been that it doesn’t give you a true picture of where you are getting clicks on your website. The contact us button might show a click through ratio of 5%, for example, but you may have a ‘contact us’ link in the footer also showing 5% and another link within the body to ‘contact us’, showing the same statistic.
The tool is already pretty cool. You can colour code the links and choose to show only those above a certain click level, but the inability to know where people are clicking on the links is a real hindrance.
Google Analytics announces Enhanced Link Attribution
The Google Analytics team has announced Enhanced Link Attribution for In-Page Analytics which adds a few new capabilities:
- Distinguish between multiple links to the same destination page, attributing the right number of clicks to each link.
- Provide click-through information even when redirects are being used.
- Provide click-through information for other elements such as buttons or navigations that were triggered by JavaScript code.
Here’s a before and after shot.
How to implement the Enhanced Link Attribution for your site
First, make sure you have the latest asynchronous version of the Google Analytics code and that it is positioned inside the <head> and </head> tags of the pages.
Add the new tag to your tracking code, before _trackPageview, as illustrated by the red text in the example below:
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
var pluginUrl =
’//www.google-analytics.com/plugins/ga/inpage_linkid.js’;
_gaq.push(['_require', 'inpage_linkid', pluginUrl]);
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-Y']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
You can read more details on these instructions here.
