GA Navigation Summary: What do those numbers mean?
Jesse, who just attended our GA training in NYC sent me an email, asking me this question about the navigation summary (caution: the answer is easy, but the question is hard to understand). “When you look at the ‘next page,’ are the % Clicks based on all next pages or all next “moves?” In other words, do the percentages take exits into account?
Usually, I have to test that kind of thing, but I had a ready made test — a profile for a new, tiny site that I had set up not hours ago. Here is what I saw when I looked at the navigation summary:
Notice that there were only ten pageviews of the homepage, which we see in the middle of the picture. So there had to be exactly ten “next moves” — everyone who looked at the homepage had to do something else after that. One clearly left, and there were clearly nine next pages, and the % clicks (the column all the way to the right, which is the column in question) is obviously based on the total number of next moves — not just on next pages.
And remember, no one gets to ask why the previous pages mirror the next pages so perfectly unless they first read this post about pages that refer to themselves and Google Analytics Gang Signals.
Robbin
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Ahh…that’s right, I remember the Google Analytics Gang Signals!
Thanks for the help! I’d like to nominate “% of Clicks” as an honorable mention to your “Deadly Titles” list. Counting an exit as a click seems pretty off to me.
I have a question about the navigation summary report. Does it include bounces? From what I have seen on our site, it doesn’t seem to — but I would like someone to tell me explicitly that it doesn’t.
All of the definitions I see for “exit” simply say it is the page from which a visitor leaves your site. Well, a bounce is a page from which a visitor leaves your site also. But are bounces and exits calculated completely separately, or do exits include bounces? Does exit imply a visit to a previous page, and entrance imply a visit to a following page? I’m getting dizzy…
A slightly linked question. Why do exit rates on the navigation summary differ from that on the preceeding content detail. For some of our pages we have 0% exit rate on the navigation summary which is 21.56% on the content detail. What does Navigation summary not include?
Yes. A lot of people are asking that same question. Stay tuned.
I am very curious to that post. I can’t find it anywhere!
Found this topic via Google having the same question as Dominic.
Has there been any development on that issue?
I now have a page which is used as a landingspage in combination with an Adwords Campaign. With 2.000 pageviews in the selected period a bounce rate of 70%, and 72% exiting the website via this page, the navigation details shows a percentage of 0!
Strangly all the pages have a exitpage of 0% in content detail.
Any idea what causes this?
I feel like one Navigation Summary problem gets fixed and two more spring up. That would be my contribution to “developments….”
The information was very helpful.
Same problem as Dominic’s and Martijn’s. I have a page that has 75.29% Bounce Rate and 76.49% Exit but has 0% Exits in Navigation Summary.
Also, under Top Exit Pages it has about 86k exits (21% of Site Total)
Wierd.
Emil/Dominic/Martin, that report is just not great. Maybe we need to accept that and move on to other reports…..