Three Ways to Use Google Analytics to Improve Usability

Nearly every report in Google Analytics can shed light on the usability successes and failures of your site. I've chosen 3 of my favorite reports that are a great place to start.

For the purposes of this blog post, you should have a basic knowledge of analytics. If you don't, start by reading this newsletter: How to Use Google Analytics. 

Site Overlay Tool

If your first reaction to seeing the analytics dashboard was like mine ("Uh oh. That's a lot of numbers. I'm not a numbers person.") then the user friendly site overlay is a good starting point to ease in to understanding how people interact with your site.  It launches the front end view of your site with percentage indicators of total clicks over every link on a page. If you prefer actual number of clicks vs. percentages, just hover over the percentage.

In my experience, there are always areas of a page that get way more or way less attention than expected. Keep an eye out for those few outliers that seem to perform unusually well or unusually poorly and adjust your layout or design to get the right areas emphasized.

Remember that if the same link is used repeatedly on a page, the same % overlay will be placed on each instance. Also, if you have links to download materials, it won't track those clicks unless you set up a 'virtual link' for that download. It will simply say 0% clicked but that's likely not true.

Top Landing Pages Report

Imagine how magazine publishers would design magazines differently if the majority of their first impressions were not the front cover, but rather interior pages. That's exactly the case for websites since the majority of visitors will land on subpages (not homepages) when googling very specific phrases that list deeply hidden subpages as top results. Most users will see your site for the first time from an obscure archived press release or article, not the homepage. You need to be aware of what those top entry points are and make sure you've got next steps clearly defined.

If you have a page that's getting a ton of traffic, coming in on great search phrases, and the abandonment rate (bounce rate over 60%) is sky high, something is wrong. It could be poor navigation or worse yet, broken links!  Adding a global description of what your company does can help orient new visitors. Also, experiment with carefully chosen related content references or calls to action tailored to that page to deepen sessions.

Navigation Analysis

The navigation summary is the closest thing to an aerial view of where users click from page to page. It is especially powerful when paired with the top landing pages report. It is a little trickier to find, as it's unique per page, so it's not on your list of left nav options.

Step 1: Choose a page, any page (may I suggest one of the top landing pages since we just covered that report) by clicking on the link of that page in any report.

Step 2: On the right lower part of the page, click the link that says 'Navigation Summary'.

This report allows you to see the steps before and after someone visits a specific page (represented by the small page icon in the middle). That includes visitors entering the site on that page (% Entrances on left) or those who lave the site after visiting that page (% Exits on right).

This report is critical when analyzing "goal" pages (for example a form page, like a signup or contact form). If they don't go through to the conversion, where do they go next? For example, if most users want to check out your portfolio before filling out a contact form, perhaps a link to the gallery on your contact page makes sense.

To learn more about Analytics, check out our How to Use Google Analytics newsletter which includes a list of additional resources on the final page.