Looking for a better way to understand how customers flow through your website? Google Analytics has a new tool to help you out. It’s called In-Page Analytics. At first glance I thought it just looked like a re-hashed version of the not-that-useful Site Overlay report. But it’s much more than that.

For those of you who haven’t used the Site Overlay report, essentially it shows you the percentage of clicks used for each link on a web page in your site, in a visual format. The idea is that you should be able to quickly see which parts of the page are getting clicks and which aren’t.

In-Page Analytics takes you deeper than that. Firstly it allows you to get rid of the ‘noise’ of the links that don’t get many clicks, by allowing you to filter those out to concentrate on the real information at hand. Then you can use the Advanced Segments feature to break down the traffic to view things such as Referral Traffic vs Search traffic, Paid vs Non-paid Search traffic, New Visitors vs Returning Visitors. Plus, you can even create your own custom segments. Even better than that, you can filter by keyword and see what users who search on specific keywords do. What is the useful for I hear you ask? Well, you could use it to help you break down content in your website further to create more specific landing pages, helping visitors get what they want faster, and you to get your conversion rate up! This can be especially useful for more generic terms.

Google hasn’t yet fixed the issue of distinguishing between two links to the same page, but say that they are working on it. I can’t wait to see this feature. Having multiple links to the same page is common and it would be really useful to see which of the links is most clicked on. I’ll give you an example. In an e-commerce store product listing, there would be several links to the product page: probably the product image, the product name, and maybe even a ‘more info’ button or something like that. It would be awesome to see if, on average, one of those links if favoured over the others. It would also be great for testing out different ‘Calls to Action’ in different areas of a page.

In-Page Analytics is currently in Beta, which means there might be a few bugs to sort out, but I think it’s moving Google Analytics in a great direction.