Interacting with Google In-Page Analytics

Visualizing user interaction has always been an important step in understanding exactly how people are engaging our websites. There’s something humbling to a web designer to see where people click and what users do when they’re actually on your website. We pride ourselves in being user experience (UX) design experts, but there are always surprising results when you can actually see the usage data. Why didn’t they click that button? Why are they using the footer navigation and not the top menu? How could they miss that call to action? Why are they trying to click the banner image?

How to track user engagement visually?

There are tons of tools out there to assist in visually outlining your website’s usage in tracking where people click on your website and the percentage of those who do. Some free, and some paid. These tools allow us to understand what users do when they are on your site, and how they are actually navigating the site to measure where they are clicking.

Google has always had an option called Site Overlay in the Google Analytics report under the ‘content’ section (which we often found quite buggy). Recently Google Analytics has released a completely remodeled version of this report called In-Page Analytics that shows click data superimposed over your website as you browse your various web pages.

What you can measure with In-Page Analytics?

Viewing “Clicks” by percentage is a report to show us where on the page that users click in respect to the percentage of those who are clicking (to help eliminate the outliers). You can see a speech bubble next to the links on your site that represent a % of users who click that link.

Scroll map is a bar that follows you as you scroll down the page to tell you the % of users who are clicking on any links below that point. It’s quite helpful in determining the true “fold” of your website as well as secondary navigation items or alternative call to action regions.

What’s lacking from In-Page Analytics?

There are still imperfections in the accuracy of the data using In-Page analytics. Knowing where on the page that someone clicks can be just as important as what the user clicks on the page. What this means is that say we have a link to our online Portfolio, and we have links to this page in both the top navigation menu and the call-to-action button on our website. In-Page Analytics would show the percentage of users who click to that page, but not that of the 43% of users who visit that page 24% use the main navigation and 19% use the call-to-action button.

We also run heat mapping tools that let us paint a better picture of exactly where people are clicking on the website to help us measure the data we receive from the In-Page Analytics in more detail.

Overall rating of the new Google In-Page Analytics

We would rate Google’s new tool around 4 out of 5. It’s an incredible tool to pair with your existing Google Analytics reports and it’s a big step up from the original Site Overlay. Customizing reports and visualizing the Goal Conversions makes this a must have, whereas something like crazy egg wouldn’t allow you to leverage the power of the other analytical data from Google. Still hoping they improve the click placement, but we’re really pleased with all of the new Google Analytics improvements and certainly the In-Page Analytics section.

This article has been provided courtesy of the top Orlando Website Design and Orlando SEO company Designzillas. Designzillas is a full service Website Design Agency in Orlando specializing in web design, user experience (UX) design, web development, e-commerce solutions, and online marketing. For more information, visit http://www.designzillas.com.

Optimizing: 3 Types of Content with 3 Different Media

Everybody’s primary goal in search optimization is to get their own site’s content to rank first or closer to first rank for specific keywords. If, however, you are having trouble doing that the following ideas will help you, but just make sure that the content is branded well enough so people know who to credit for it.

We are going to see how:

* SEO Title,

* Meta Description,

* Meta Keywords, and

* H1 Tags — are going to work with 1.YouTube Videos, 2. Slide Share Presentations, and 3. Flickr Photos, with a stronger domain authority.

1. YouTube Videos:

YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. YouTube is a web-service that allows anybody to post their video files and share them with other people. It is owned by Google; hence videos are well ranked in search results. The following parts of YouTube details are used for the video page’s SEO optimization.

* SEO Title: The most important SEO element in your video pages is the ‘Video Title’. This is where you will want your brand name and keywords if you can fit them both together. You Tube will append – YouTube to the end of the title.

* Meta Description: Your video page’s Meta Description will be taken from your video description. Doing this is little tricky as some people like to include their link first to get clicks from their videos to their website. But if you can include that along with a keyword enhanced description within 160 characters you’re all set & ready.

* Meta Keyword: Google may not much care about of Meta Keywords, but be sure to use them at least just for an enhancement. The tags of your video are used as the Meta keyword for the video page. YouTube separates keyword phrases by space & not comma, so be careful to put the quotes around a keyword phrase.

* H1 Tag: Your title will be again used in H1 tags by YouTube.

Don’t forget to use the YouTube’s own keyword tool for keyword ideas based on video search.

2. SlideShare Presentation:

SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is one among the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. Have you got any Power Point Presentation that you could like to share from webinars, seminars etc…? This Slide Share will help you, & the following will help you optimize those presentations for search.

* SEO Title: The SEO title for your presentation page is simply the title of your presentation. You can completely use the 70 characters as your desire because SlideShare doesn’t append their name to the title. You can use up to 3,000 characters, but only the first160 characters will count.

* Meta Description: The Meta Description for your presentation page is the presentation’s description.

* Meta Keyword: Meta Keywords for your presentation pages are derived from the presentation tag that you enter. The limit is only up to 20.

* H1 Tag: SlideShare will use your presentation’s title in H1 tag also.

Although the links do not count for SEO value, you can include links in your PowerPoint presentation so that people can click it while viewing your presentation on SlideShare. Be sure to include those to get traffic back to your website.

3. Flickr Photos:

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world. Flickr is home to over five billion of the world’s photos. Flickr is always in your back pocket with apps for iPhone, Windows 7, Android, and more. Popping up in image search results can be a powerful way to generate traffic, and one of the top image networks is easily Flickr. Below is how to optimize your images for SEO and traffic generation back to your website.

* SEO Title: Your image page’s SEO title will be used as the title of your image. Flickr will append – Flickr to the end of the title.

* Meta Description: Your video page’s Meta Description will be taken from your video description. The image description is a great place to add your link; you can use anchor text to come back from the link to your website.

* Meta Keyword: The Meta Keyword is derived from the image tags itself. These tags also helps users search for images on Flickr, so be sure to add some good photos.

* H1 Tags: Flickr will be using your image title again in H1 tags.

If you want to use your images for link building, then upload them with Creative Commons rights, and in your image description after the first 160 characters, note that anyone can use the image freely if they link back to your website using the following link and anchor text. It can be a great way to share images that bloggers might use in their posts, infographics, etc…

“Have a Nice Day”