In this video, Andy is going to show you how you can utilize Google Analytics to improve
your navigation. All and more coming up. Hey there, measuregeeks. Julian here back
with another video. Today, we have Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios on the channel to
show us how we can utilize Google analytics to improve our navigation. Now, Orbit Media
Studios is a web design and web development company, and they oftentimes use data to improve
their clients' websites. Obviously, Google analytics plays a role in that, and Andy has
some great use cases on his YouTube channel that I'm going to link up down below. This
is where I came across his videos originally, and I asked him, could you make a video, a
similar video for us here on this channel? He graciously agreed. So that's why we've
got lots to cover. Let's dive in. Thanks Julian. You don't hear a lot about
this on the analytics channels because this is something that doesn't require any setup
at all. And I think a lot of analysts miss it because it's hiding right there in plain
sight. The navigation summary is actually a very fundamental report inside Google analytics.
I find the user's flow report very hard to do analysis from or the behaviors flow report.
These aren't simple views into the basic question, answering that fundamental thing about where
people go from where, but the navigation summary makes it very simple. It puts it all right
there in a list. You can see the performance of your navigation, the effectiveness of your
calls to action. Internal links are little things getting fill a lot are big things getting
missed. Here's how to do basic analysis using the navigation summary inside Google analytics.
Okay, here's the website. This happens to be my website. And I'm gonna
answer a fundamental question, which is how well is this navigation performing? Where
are people going from here? I'm on the homepage. I can see where people are going from here,
which is really important. If you've got something like a big drop down menu with a whole bunch
of stuff in it. If your navigation creates a lot of visual noise, if you're not sure
what to call something, you can test hypotheses. To do that, all we need to do is to go into
Google analytics, go to the behavior section of course, site content, of course, and then
to the all pages section from which I'm going to click on to drill down into just the homepage.
Let's get a little bit more data, just a couple of months. And these are all the pages on
the website. And when I click on a page to drill down,
I'm going to see just that page kind of boring. At first, I'm looking at just a one road report,
but this is it right here. So many people miss it. It's right there. It's like a tab
there at the top. And I frequently get the feedback that wow Andy, thanks that was helpful
I never saw that before. Click on the navigation summary. And now you're looking at a report
that shows how people got to that page. Here's a little icon for the page and where people
went from that page. There's some clever ways to do the previous page path analysis. Um,
but I'm going to focus on this for now, just on the next, the next page path analysis.
So half the people who came here left from here, the other half, what did they do?
They went to these pages. They went from this page to these pages. And so I can quickly
see where, what they're clicking on. What's performing in the navigation, what gets clicked
a lot. What never gets clicked. You can expand to see more rows if you'd like, if you don't
see what you're looking for right away, there's a little search filter. So you can find stuff
right away and you'll find as usual, there's an exponential drop off where the things farther
down the list get just a fraction as much attraction, very, very useful. You're measuring
the effectiveness of navigation labels and have calls to action and internal links like
I said. One thing that you do not get from this report information about which thing
they clicked. Look, this takes you to the portfolio. This also takes you to the portfolio.
Okay. The next page path report doesn't show me from which a button or link they clicked.
So that's a gap. I think there is a way to do this in analytics and Julian would know
enhanced link attribution. I think it's called. I can't name a single marketer that uses that.
I'm sure someone does. When you want to know that, I think it's much more common to use,
um, a kind of a supplementary tool like Hotjar, which has heat map or heat maps for clicks
and scrolls, uh, for devices, desktop, tablet, and mobile. Uh, and this is a way to see,
so portfolio versus you all work, I can see that got four 90, 94 clicks or so this got
18 clicks. So this seems to be about five times as popular as this. So there are limits
to the next page path report and the navigation summary, but it's still so fast and so easy.
And it's often very, the insights will jump out at you.
I'm going to show you another example on a site for which I'm going to have to fuss everything
up, but there's a bunch of navigation on this website. It has drop downs. It's a tall page,
all kinds of content and a primary navigation sub navigation. This report is the homepage
navigation summary. And the one thing that it shows is that the most popular click from
the homepage, I'm sorry. I really do need to blur all this out. So I apologize. But
the number one click, which gets about 10% of all clicks from the homepage, which is
twice as much as the third and fourth and fifth, most popular pages, right? A lot, a
lot of clicks is this team link. Where is the team? It's not the secondary nav. It's
not in the primary nav. It's not in the body text. This down here at the bottom, in the
footer. Third in this column is the number one click
on this page immediately, right? What would be a good hypothesis to draw from this? People
want to see your people put your faces up higher. Put the team page link in the primary
navigation, right? Feature team members in a prominent page block. There are a million
little things that you could do to help this person find what they're trying to do faster.
As usual. The analysis sounds like this. Find out what they're trying to do and make it
easy for them to do what they're trying to do. Find the things that you want them to
see, but that they're not seeing and make those things you want to guide them toward
easier to find. That is navigation optimization done using the navigation summary report,
specifically looking at the next page path. Uh, hope that's helpful.
All right, so there you have it. This is how you can utilize the navigation summary report
to improve the navigation on your website. What do you think? Do you use a different
report? I'd love to hear from you in the comments down below. Thanks again to Andy who has produced
this video for us. If you want to find out more about orbit media studios, we have a
link down below and definitely also check out their YouTube channel where Andy has some
more videos on Google analytics. Now, if you enjoyed this video, then you should definitely
subscribe if you haven't yet, because we're bringing you new videos, just like this one
every week. Now, my name is Julian til next time.