You Ask, I Answer: Tracking Specific Link Clicks in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Will asks, I'm searching for something that tells me what people click on when they are on one of my basic product landing pages. The problem I'm trying to solve, boss says, I bet this particular button gets a lot of clicks, which means we need to move some of the content on that other page onto this page, and you want to find out, of course, uh what's really working. So there's a couple of different ways to do this. In Google Analytics, the easiest way would be to use behavior flow. In fact, let's uh go ahead and switch this over.

So in the behavior section of Google Analytics, there's overview, there's behavior flow. Behavior flow shows you the page they start on and then sort of the pathing they take. Now, if there's a specific page you want, click on that little gear icon here. There you go. And then add a match type item.

So the match type uh contains, for example, let's do my uh speaking, my public speaking. Eight people come in on that page, and then actually all eight leave. This is for uh last seven days. So this tells me what people have gone to next. Now, this is contingent on a couple things.

One, there's only one link from your landing page to whatever the next pages are. So if there was page A, B, and C, you had to if you want to know what's going to get the click. If there's five links to page B on page A, this is not going to tell you that. To fix that, you'd have to go into Google Tag Manager and specify uh there are specific buttons that you can put a tracking tag on to fire an event. That event would then show up in Google Analytics.

You could you would set that up under uh events to track what events those things are. Um you can track those as as flows, pages, things like that. Uh let's see if we've got one here we can look at. Uh YouTube, uh entry content, medium button, specific buttons. You can see in I've got events set up in Google Tag Manager that then track what it is that people are doing on my website, and these have a flow as well.

So if you know uh there's a specific sequence of a type of uh clicks that you'd want, you can you can track those clicks. However, this is a very manual process. This is okay for answering a specific question about one interface element, but if you're trying to figure out what's best, what works best, or what combination of changes work best, this is not the way to go because this is just gonna give you a headache, and this doesn't tell you anything really about the effectiveness of that page. What you really want to be looking at is Google Optimize. So if you go to optimize.google.com, it's part of the Google marketing platform, it's free of charge, so it's it should be easy for you to get started.

Uh and you can see here that there are different tests that you can run to set up A-B testing on uh different interface elements, and sometimes you'll get a winner, sometimes say no, clearly it was found, and you'll get nice statistics. But what makes this good is that it's tied to a specific goal. Not just did somebody click on something, but your Google Analytics goals, you can specify. I want to know does this change cause someone to uh convert better? Right?

Conversion rate optimization. Google Optimize is the best tool for this overall scenario, which is your boss is saying, Hey, there's some stuff here that I think will work better over here. This is the way to go. So three different answers for tracking specific link links. Number one, behavior flow.

If you know there's only one link on the page that goes to where you want. Number two, events in Google Tag Manager tracking link clicks. And three, the best scenario here, Google Optimize. Google Optimize is free, by the way. There's there's a paid version, but uh the free version will definitely do exactly what it is that you're trying to do here.

And it's the best choice for testing, A, because it's automated. Uh once you set up the testing parameters, and B, it's statistically valid, which I think is an important uh part. If you don't have that statistical validity, then yeah, you can say this gets more clicks, but does it result in the net impact that you're looking for? So check those three things out. Uh leave your follow up questions in the comments box below.

As always, uh subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.