Want to learn more about how people use your website? The Navigation Summary report inside Google Analytics makes it easy to identify if your navigation menu is performing by showing the pages users landed on and where they visited next.
Hi, this is Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios, and I'm making a supergroup video for you guys to help you learn how to better optimize the navigation on your website. Let's jump right in.
So I'm just in analytics under the behaviour site content all pages report, probably one of the top most popular reports in all of analytics, and I'm going to click on any of the top pages. Let's go to the homepage, for example. You can do it from any page. And then there's a link at the very top. It's kind of like a tab, but a lot of people miss it. It's hiding right there in plain sight. Open up that tab, the navigation summary, and it's going to show you where people came from to get to this page, that little icon right there, as if it's the page, what percentage started there, and then where they went from there, or what percentage left from there. The where they went from their part, the next page path is basically showing you the performance of your website navigation.
The analysis jumps right out of you. Are there navigation items that never get clicked, or that get clicked all the time? How effective are those calls to action? Are internal links effective? This report, almost never used, I never hear almost anyone ever talking about it, will basically give you immediate ideas on how to optimize navigation labels, on things to remove, on which calls to action should be adjusted. One thing it doesn't show you is if there are two ways to get to a subsequent page, which of those they clicked. For that, you'll need a tool like Hotjar or a fancy Google Analytics setup using enhanced link attribution. Nobody does that. But right there, plain sight, you can quickly see if maybe you should experiment with different navigation labels, maybe remove something that's not working, or tweak up that call to action. Again, Andy from Orbit Media, hope this was helpful. Happy marketing.