I have no doubts about the POTENTIAL value of site overlay–in terms of showing us where user’s are clicking–but I see major technical challenges in implementing an overlay that is accurate.

Some of the diagrams in Avinash’s book show “hot spotting,” not just site overlay. I think a true hot spot visual would be helpful but I wonder how it is implemented.

FWIW they are in the RSS feed, just don’t show up on the page itself. I suspect there’s some sort of template “put here” that could be used.

Cheers!
- Steve

Andre, you do such a nice job on the GA Groups, you and ShoreTel deserve awards. And to your point here - I found a profile where the overlay wasn’t broken, and you are *right*, the links are no longer identical. So now I need to go do some testing, and maybe I will have to rewrite a portion of this. I haven’t used the overlays in so long, maybe they have changed ten times without my looking at it…. I have to do some testing.

I too didn’t find Site Overlay very useful when all the major vendors started to imitate ClickTracks on this. In fact, it can be very useful when one analyzes how a page, seen as UI, redirects traffic. The problem you mention is common. However, in more sophisticated applications than GA (WebTrends for instance, which I know well), one can add code to the links, so that one can know which of the many links to the same page got the clicks. Or maybe it’s possible to do it with GA; I dn’t know.

“Here is why: the Overlay is just a visual representation of the content > Top Content report.”

In my opinion the Overlay is a visual representation of the Content > Navigation Summary. If I check the Overlay on Page A I see 10 people that clicked on the link to C. But if I check it on page B I see only 5 people that click the link to Page C.

Avinash and Blog Post Author: what do you think?

1. I find the Site Overlay feature a god send for being able to clearly demonstrate to the system owners which parts of the site are redundant or simply not used. They’ve *known* this for years - but graphically showing it (and be honest - attached to the Google Magic Brand) almost made them take action at long last. Key word is “almost”.

2. OTOH; I had no idea of the problems you raise Robbin! That puts a severe damper an any enthusiasm I have had.

3.With Work’s site: we have lots of pages that are fundamentally identical - different contents, but same structure. The site overlay has a very 1 to 1 correlation to pages, so it’s very hard to answer for real life example: “Just how useful, site wide, is the Right Hand Side Nav Bar”. I’ve stuck with my funky perl scripts and log magic for that one.
Knowing that the RHS Nav is no good on the “Blood Transfusion” page (for example) is of very questionable value.
It just doesn’t scale well when you’re talking ~1200+ key pages.

Perhaps I should look at crazy egg again…

Cheers!
- Steve

Avinash — I know that you can separate the methodology from the tool. But I cannot. GA is the most important WA tool we use at LunaMetrics. We do use Crazy Egg, and it is wonderful for site overlay abilities, and it really helps me understand how a page is used — but in a way that the GA site overlay does not.

Maybe we can just say, “Overlays are awesome, and the GA overlay sucks.”

It is my sincerest wish that we can separate the methodology from the tool.

My Web Analytics Demystified post was targeted towards new users of web analytics. I am utterly convinced that, whatever the tool, Site Overlay is the best methodology to understand what is happening on pages on our websites.

Yes between the page data report and the navigation report and the referrals report and next click report and …… I can see exactly where people come to a page from and what they do. But the Site Overlay is the most easy to use, and damn visual to boot (!), way to get that data from one page.

On to the tool…. Some tools are good at doing Site Overlay and other tools are not very good. If the tool you have, or I have :), does not work then try something else. Trust me people who make tools will notice! I shared my love for ClickTracks in the post. I also shared the confetti screenshot of CrazyEgg in my post (which Mailand points to in his comment).

In my book Users come first and I am sincerely appreciative of all the feedback!

-Avinash.