If you’re a regular Analytics user, you might have noticed that Analytics no longer offers the site overlay feature. Instead, it’s been replaced by a brand new feature, called In-Page Analytics.
This change was announced by Google just over a week ago, and to be honest, we had a moment of confusion about it at first, because we couldn’t find the overlay, no matter how hard we looked. Took us a little while to realise that it was because it wasn’t called an overlay anymore.
Analytics Site Overlay?
If you never made use of the site overlay feature of your analytics, here’s a brief overview of what it offered.
Basically, the overlay provided you with an image of your web page, that showed the percentage of clicks each link on the page received. It wasn’t perfect of course, and there were a number of shortcomings that Google recognised with the feature.
These included the fact that the overlay couldn’t deal with things like image maps, spaces in URLs, Javascript links or redirects.
These issues and more have been addressed in the new feature, which has replaced the overlay completely.
In-Page Analytics?
Essentially, the In-Page Analytics feature has the same underlying purpose as the site overlay did, in that it superimposes some of your Google Analytics data over a snapshot of your page. It provides a lot more information though, giving you the opportunity to gain an even better understanding of the user behaviour on your site.
It’s improvements over the old site overlay include image map support, filters and advanced segment options, page level information, and a complete list of outgoing links.
If you’ve got a Google analytics account, you can find the new In-Page Analytics feature in the Content section of your Analytics.
In Conclusion
Well, at first glance, we think that this looks like a great addition to Google Analytics. The more information you can get about user behaviour on your website, the better. Because that’s how you know what’s working on your site, and what isn’t.
We’re looking forward to experimenting with the new feature, and putting the data we get from Google’s new In Page Analytics to good use.