Linking to other sites increases your stickyness

I really like Google Analytics. You can do more clever analytical reviews with it than many people assume. Ever since I kicked this blog out of the long grass at the start of the year I've been using user-defined segmentation. I've been tracking link clicks.

On this blog there are four types of clicks that I track:
  • Blog Clicks - clicks on the blog roll
  • External Clicks - clicks to external sites
  • Nav Clicks - clicks on the navigation
  • Social Clicks - clicks on the digg, del.icio.us, etc links at the bottom of the posts

The P/Visit column is the one to watch. This records the pages per visit. The highest value is on External-Clicks up at 2.89. That's nearly twice as many page views any other.

To be brutal - these are low P/Visit counts. Blogs tend to be low as readers pop in based on an RSS prompt or tag match and then leave again. However, this data goes back until Janurary so there is a clear trend.

This data should not be taken as scientific. I've not closed the test. I meddled with my tracking some point.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Maybe I'm missing something but where is this option for the clicks? I've been using other programs, would be easier to keep it within analytics...

Glen / ViperChill
Andrew Girdwood said…
Hi Glen,

Click tracking like this isn't part of the default Google Analytics. You need to look up "user-defined" segmentation. The option to review user-defined is under visitor segment performance.

Popular Posts