Google In-Page Analytics 'Hotspots'

If you use Google Analytics then you'll know what a fantastic tool it is. Most people who use Analytics will only scrape the surface and look at their recent visitors, landing pages and the keywords that people have used to find their site. This is fine, but if you want to find out what people are doing when they visit your website and what the most popular links are, then keep reading.

One excellent tool within Analytics is the In-Page Analytics feature, or more commonly known as 'hotspots'. To find this you'll need to click on 'Content' and then at the bottom of the menu click on 'In-Page Analytics' (see the screenshot to the right).

What does this do?
Well, In-Page Analytics will pull up the home page of your website and will highlight what percentage of visitors have clicked on which links. You can then click through the site to see the same on other pages also.

Here you can see In-Page Analytics activated on our home page and is pulling in data collected over the past 3 days. One thing that is instantly noteable is that people are clicking on links at the bottom of the page too. There has always been a horrible theory that no one looks below the 'fold', or in other words, no body likes to scroll down the page. We have proven this wrong on a number of occasions to our clients, people are used to scrolling on websites so it's not a big issue any more.

Anyway, looking at our home page you can see that a high percentage of people are clicking onto the about us page and the our work page, also each of the services within the drop down menu are getting clicks too.

You will have noticed that in the bottom right hand corner of our site we have a 'splash banner' that we use to advertise certain things, this has had a number of clicks over the past few days which shows that it's a good place on the site to have a call to action.

Why would I be interested in this?
If you have special offers on your website, or certain call to actions that aren't getting used as much as you'd hoped then this is a great way of seeing where people's eyes are drawn to, and what sections of the site they are clicking on. 

For example, if your call to action is in the right hand column of your home page, but the majority of click are coming from the left hand side, then it's clear that people's eyes drawn to the left hand side, so that's where your call to action should be.

What are your thoughts?
If you've used In-Page Analytics to successfully draw traffic to a certain page then I'd be very interested to hear from you. Please leave your comments below.

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