Google In-Page Analytics is one of the most intriguing and impressive features of Analytics. Having been around for a few months in beta, now seems like a good time to take a look at the pros and cons of the tool. What's good about it? What doesn't work? What could be improved?

Pros

The biggest pro, and the raison d'etre of In-Page Analytics is the ability to see where people click on the page and follow navigation paths through your site. Although this data has always been available in Analytics, it took a lot of digging around, some expertise and a cauldron of patience.

In-Page offers an intuitive visual map that gives instant access to detailed navigation data and in a way that can make necessary on-page optimisation and even web design changes more immediately obvious than trying to mentally map dry data onto the page yourself. This is particularly useful with judicious use of filters, allowing you to quickly see behaviour differences between different demographics.

As a consequence it serves as a useful tool for Analytics newbies, or for showing data to clients who aren't as technically literate as we might wish (and why should they be?) It can be used to give a quick overview without the usual deluge of graphs and dry numbers.

The 'clicks below' feature, which shows a collective percentage of clicks on links below the part of the page you're looking at is particularly useful in tracking vertical drop off in interest. It can be quite revealing as to how much of a difference page location can make to the attention a link gets, and could easily lead to a rearrangement of the page to make sure your best offers (for example) get pride of place.

Deciding on these best offers is another thing that In-Page Analytics can really help with, as by tracking 'next pages' you can easily see what the most popular products on your site are. For example, if you run a car dealership you can quickly see what the most popular makes are, and quickly click through to the models within that – offering easily accessible data to inform special offers and promotions.

Cons

Great as In-Page Analytics can be, it’s not all roses, and the Devil's in the detail.

Where it displays a percentage to represent the proportion of visitors to a page who clicked a certain link, it does so by the target url, rather than the actual link. So for example, if your logo links to your homepage and you also have a home button, it will show the same percentage across both of them rather than telling you whether people clicked the logo or the home button most. Whilst not a major issue, this does cut into the tool's usefulness.

Similarly, there is no way of tracking clicks to on-page anchors, meaning that if you have a lot of content on a page, and have used anchors for usability, you can't tell which particular part is prompting people to click (especially considering the above con).

Perhaps most significantly, In-Page doesn't currently track 'submit' buttons on forms. This could be a tremendously useful feature in tracking which pages people convert from, and to some extent bypass the need to set up Goals for those who don't know how, in keeping with the accessibility of it.

In fact, given that the number of goals you can set up are limited, for some sites with multiple contact forms tracking submit clicks could provide more detailed tracking than is currently possible.

Improvements

So where could In-Page Analytics be improved? In light of the above, tracking clicks by link rather than URL would be a major improvement, as would tracking submission form entries.

Beyond fixing these obvious cons, there are some usability tweaks that would make a real difference. For example, hovering over a link will bring up a pop-up that displaying more detailed statistics, however the user has no control over the position of this and it can be frustratingly obstructive

Making them draggable and/or transparent, or perhaps even formatted similarly to Excel comments would streamline usability tremendously.

The quick links to the filters at the top of the window are great to have, but changing a filter requires deleting the current one and selecting a new one, rather than seamlessly switching between them as one would expect.

Another great feature let down by functionality is the ability to have the In-Page overlay on the website proper when you open it in a new tab whilst using the tool in Analytics. This allows you to use the website as you normally would, full screen in your browser, with added data; rather than as a window in Analytics. However, that this feature exists is not clearly marked anywhere, and seems to be only discoverable through experimentation, despite being the most intuitive use of the tool.

Summing Up

In-Page Analytics is an interesting development in Google Analytics, but still has a way to go if it's going to fulfil its potential. It's worth noting as well that when we set an Analytics newbie on it he found a number of bugs, as well as experiencing frustration at the usability issues we've highlighted.

We should cut it some slack of course as it's still in beta, but once these (relatively minor) issues are solved we’ll certainly be making much greater use of it.

About the authors: Nick Lewis and Krystian Szastok are SEOs for Brighton SEO (UK) and web design agency Bozboz.