For the most part, examining your web analytics consists of looking at dry columns of numbers and links with a few bar charts and other graphs thrown in for good measure. It’s often hard to understand these numbers in the context of your own site. Now, however, with Google Analytics’ new “In-Page Analytics” view, you can see your analytics data superimposed on your own site.
This new view offers a far more visual experience for analyzing your analytics data, as bubbles are now overlayed on top of every link on your site. These bubbles that show the percentage and number of clicks the link attracted and allow you to dig deeper into your data if you choose to do so.
You can find this new feature in the “Content” section on Google Analytics. Google currently considers this a beta feature and there are a few known bugs, but overall it seems to work just as advertised. One nice feature is a bar at the bottom of the screen that notes how many clicks on a given page occurred below the current view.
It is worth noting that other web analytics providers like ClickTale and Crazy Egg offer a similar feature by providing their users with heat maps that represent clicks on a given area on your site. The concept here is quite similar, though Google Analytics does provide more advanced data than most of these products and is available for free.
