We are going to show you something that will take only a minute to setup, but will give you an insight into how your customers are using your website which I am 100% certain will lead you to redesigning your homepage.

We are going to use the In-Page Analytics which can be found in the content section of Google Analytics:

You will then see your homepage with lots of bubbles showing you the clicks each of the links have recieved.

Beautiful – Yes, Useful – Not really.

As you can see from this screenshot, the data can be a bit confusing. How is it possible my search button, home link, and logo all got 75% of the clicks on the page.

Click to enlarge

Well the answer is quite simple, what you are seeing is clicks by URL, not actual clicks on the page. In our eBook, we focus on finding actionable data, and unfortuntatly this is not really actionable data. However, there is a simple solution.

Enhanced Link Attribution

Now you can actually see where people are clicking on your web page. This is what the same page looks like after Enhanced Link Attribution was turned on (this for the day after):

Click to enlarge

Now it starts to get interesting, and I can see from this that I get a large number of people going straight to the search button. I set this up recently for a client, and he was shocked to find the most popular link on his homepage was near the bottom of the page, and was his Features List. The homepage was clearly not giving them all the answers to their questions, so we started to think about a homepage redesign.

Setting up Enhanced Link Attribution with Google Analyticator

In Google Analytics click on Admin and then Property Settings:

Scroll down to In-Page Analytics and check the box to use Enhanced Link Attribution.  My own personal preference is to use it in full view mode. I find it a bit less cramped.

Google Analytics will then send you here page and will ask you to copy this line:

var pluginUrl =
‘//www.google-analytics.com/plugins/ga/inpage_linkid.js’;
_gaq.push(['_require', 'inpage_linkid', pluginUrl]);

Now all you need to do is open up Google Analyticator and scroll down to the section called Additional Tracking Code and paste this line into the before tracker initalization box:

Hit save in Google Analyitcator and you are done. It’s as simple as that. Come back in a couple of days time, and see how your customers are really using your website.

By default it opens on the homepage, but to visit other pages, just click through on the website, and the data will then load in for that page.

Troubleshooting:
Make sure your Default URL in your Property Settings in Google Analytics is correct. If your website redirects from http://www. to http:// this will cause problems. Checkout the Google troubleshooting page for more details.

Here’s the slide deck of a presentation I gave at WordCamp Melbourne last weekend.

I’ll make a separate video of this presentation shortly but I’ve been asked for the slides a lot so here they are.

If you apply just 5 things out of the 101 ideas in this presentation you will start attracting better quality clients and you will be able to increase your fees and work on more exciting projects.

Enjoy – and leave me a comment below and tell me what you found most valuable.

Our friend Joost De Valk posted back in Nov 2012 about selling premium WordPress plugins and it’s caused a bit of a stir among our community so I thought I’d invite you all to leave a comment here and tell us your experiences of buying WordPress plugins. Do you have a favourite premium plugin you just couldn’t live without or do you think all plugins should be free? Are you an author of premium plugins and if so why did you choose to charge for your code?

Some questions to consider:

What are the benefits of paying for a plugin?

Is support usually better for premium plugins vs free?

Do premium plugins help WordPress grow as a platform or detract from its evolution?

If you do not buy premium plugins, why not?

Please leave your comments below and tell us what you think.

Ben Hunt is a web designer and author who specialises in designing websites that convert. His books include Save The Pixel, Convert and his brand new book How To Be #1 (Your Complete Handbook to Niche Domination).

In this interview, Ben talks about designing websites for conversions.

For your chance to win a copy of (more…)

G’day, Troy Dean here from Video User Manuals and I just wanted to cover off a common question that we get regarding our approach to WordPress development. One of the big questions is, do you mention WordPress in the sales presentation or the sales process or the development process with your client? Do you try and hide the fact that it’s WordPress or do you talk openly about the fact that you’re using WordPress? We’ve had a few questions and a few comments from people who seem to be a little bit confused about our philosophy on this, and I understand why. We make the White Label CMS plug-in which is all about removing WordPress from the dashboard and from the log-in screen, and we also make the Video User Manual plug-in, and the videos in that plug-in include the WordPress branding in the videos. In some of our eBooks we talk about removing WordPress from the dashboard and the log-in screen to avoid confusion. (more…)