The Lonely Marketer

I know what you’re thinking…another Google tool and another positive review. Sometimes I feel the same way, but the damn company keeps coming up with useful, FREE tools that I use often and think other small business marketers could use as well.

I’ve written many times on this blog about the importance of landing pages. Well, sometimes even more important than the landing page is where the visitor goes after landing on the landing page. I will sometimes use my landing pages as survey tools. I’ll put a variety of product lines up and see where visitors clicks…thus getting an idea of what is of interest to my customer base at that time.

Buried deep in Google Analytics, my tool of choice to analyze my web traffic, is a useful resource for analyzing user navigation and behavior. Here is where you can find it:

Next, select the page you want to view from the area highlighted by the vertical oval. After selecting the page, you’ll have a couple of options for viewing your stats on that page. You can see the top 10 clicks to and from along with percentages after selecting the page. But, you can also get a graphical presentation of these stats by clicking on the overlay page symbol in the middle - highlighted by my smaller horizontal oval.

I like the overlay page (below) presentation because you can get a feel for what your visitors saw and how they interacted with the page. The blog isn’t a great example because most of the highly clicked links are buried in previous posts, but you can get the overall idea. The area I’ve circled shows how the tool reports clicks on a link. Each hyperlink on the page has a box like this by it that when clicked will show how many clicks to that link as well as the percentage of overall clicks. It really give you an insight into the behavior of your visitor.

I like to think of it as FREE market research. My images show the navigation for The Lonely Marketer as an example, but I find the tool is much more useful for our corporate site than it is my blog.

Are you using this tool or something similar? I’m curious to know if this is as popular with other people who analyze web traffic. Here are a few recent posts talking about Google Analytics and some of the buried features:

• Google Analytics: Get More Out of It
• Analytics on the Cheap: Six Free Stats Packages for the Startup or Small-Business Owner
• Using Google Analytics with Website Optimizer