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

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

Will asks, “I’m searching for something that tells me what people click on when they are 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.”

There are three answers here. First, Behavior Flow will give you usable insights into what someone’s next steps are, with the caveat that there can only be one destination link on the source page. Second, Google Tag Manager special events will allow you to fire specific events on specific clicks or interface elements. Third, Google Optimize will answer your boss’ question of what’s working by setting up testing scenarios.

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

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In today’s episode we’ll asks, I’m searching for something that tells me what people click on when they are on one of my basic product landing page is 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 the other page on this page.

And you want to find out for us 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 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 the pathing.

They take map, there’s a specific page you want, click on that little gear icon here.

And then add a match type item.

So the match type contains For example, let’s do my speaking my public Speaking, eight people come in on that page.

And then actually all eight leave this is for 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 them, you want to know what’s going to get the click, if there’s five links to page be on page eight, this is not going to tell you that.

To fix that, you’d have to go into Google Tag Manager and specify other specific buttons that you can put a tracking tag on to fire an event.

And that event would then show up in Google Analytics you could do and set that up under events to track what events those things are.

They can track those as as flows pages, things like that.

Let’s see we’ve got one here we can look at YouTube.

Entry content, medium button specific buttons you can see 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, there’s a specific sequence of a type of clicks that you 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 going to 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 you go to optimize google.

com.

It’s part of the Google Marketing Platform, it’s free of charge, so it should be easy for you to get started.

And you can see here, there are different tests you can run to set up a B testing on Different interface elements.

And sometimes you’ll get a winner sometimes to say no clearly 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 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 where you want number two events in Google Tag Manager tracking link clicks, and three, the best scenario here, Google Optimize, Google optimizes free by the way, there’s, there’s a paid version, but the free version will definitely do easily.

exactly what it is that you’re trying to do here.

And it’s the best choice for testing.

A because it’s automated, lets you set up testing parameters and be it statistically valid, which I think is an important 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.

Leave follow up questions in the comments box below.

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