The site overlay in Google Analytics

One of the first tasks with a new website or new pages is to study, study and study the site overlay within Google Analytics.

This is a very useful tool to tell you what people click on to move around the site. To any site designer or developer you get so involved in what you are doing it sometimes becomes hard to stay focused on the end game.

This means when you go live it is very important to verify your plans and see what people click on. A recent website we created had a number of large link images on the front page that during all our testing we used but when we went live we noticed most people clicked on smaller menus and not the big images. This made us perform a study and we noticed that the big images were not obvious to new visitors and so a simple change to the images by putting a very small “click here” meant people then started to click.

In summary, Google Analytics should be a critical part of your go-live plan to verify your design goals!