Site overlay is another interesting feature of Google Analytics, which enables us to get a view of the overall visitor navigation stats on your site. It gives an idea on how the visitors interact and navigate once they enter your website. The site overlay option is available under the “Content” section of you Google Analytics dashboard. When you click on the the ‘Site Overlay’ link you would be taken to a new page which display the home page of your website. In this page you can see small progress bar over every link in your home page. The progress bar also shows the percentage of the number of clicks over that link. The more clicks a link recieves, the percentage on the progress bar increases and that percentage is reppresented by a blue shade. The more click a link receives, the more percentage on the link and hence a long blue shade would be seen on the progress bar.
This feature is an integral part in going forward with web analytics and optimizing the website for better traffic.
This feature is an integral part in going forward with web analytics and optimizing the website for better traffic. When you move you mouse over the progress bar, you can also know about the number of clicks that links have received. You can also get information on the goal value for the pages in your site. Goal value is the value of the conversions your site has received over time, and for this you must have to set the goals. With this feature you can determine the most popular page on your website and also the least popular link on your website. It helps you to figure out whether your text links are being clicked more than your image links and vice versa.
The one shortcoming of this site overlay feature is the inablity to show indivitual click ratio for 2 or more links which points to the same page on the website. For example if you have 2 links on your home page which points to your ‘Products’ page and they get 4% clicks and 9% clicks respectively, both will show 13%. Google Analytics cannot show the separete click for the links. Google is working on this issue to get it resolved, but till then we have to presist with the current version.
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