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

Related posts:

1. Navigation, Bounce and Exit
2. Use Advanced Segments to Get Quick-and-Dirty Visit Numbers
3. What kind of navigation is best?
4. Mini-case study: Analytics, overlays and internal search.
5. Google Analytics: Worst Titles Ever

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Google Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.