Announcing Enhanced Link Attribution for In-Page Analytics

In-Page Analytics provides click-through data in the context of your actual site, and is a highly effective tool to analyze your site pages and come up with actionable information that can be used to optimize your site content.

Before now, In-Page Analytics was limited to showing clickthrough information by URL and not by the actual link on the page, and was limited to showing information only on links, and not on other elements like buttons. The most common complaint about In-Page Analytics is that if a page has two or more links to the same destination page, we show the same statistics for both links, since there was no telling which link the user actually clicked.

We are now introducing a new feature that solves these issues. To use Enhanced Link Attribution, you’ll need to add two lines to your tracking snippet and enable the feature in the web property settings. In-Page Analytics will then use a combination of element IDs and destination URL to provide the following new capabilities:

• Distinguish between multiple links to the same destination page, attributing the right number of clicks to each link.
• Provide click-through information even when redirects are being used.
• Provide click-through information for other elements such as buttons or navigations that were triggered by JavaScript code.

Here’s an example of how Enhanced Link Attribution can improve In-Page Analytics:

Before (without Enhanced Link Attribution):

After (With enhanced link attribution):

Notice the following differences:

• There’s a very prominent red ‘Add Subtitles’ link (that’s styled to look like a button) that didn’t show any click information before Enhanced Link Attribution, but now shows 20%. This is because clicking this link results in a server redirect to one of multiple pages, none of which is the URL specified in the link itself.
• Clicks on the link “Aquarium of Genoa (Italy)” were reported as 5.1%, but this is actually shared with clicks on the thumbnail to the left of that link. With Enhanced Link Attribution the thumbnail shows 2.3% and the text link 2.8%.
• With Enhanced Link Attribution clicks on the search button got 10%. This button results in a form submission to multiple URLs (that include the search string). We also see 0.1% clicks on the language filter, which actually causes some JavaScript code to run.

To find out more about Enhanced Link Attribution, and how to use it on your site, please read our help center article.

We are rolling out this feature gradually over the next few weeks so please be patient if you don’t have the option to enable it in the web property settings. In any case, you can tag your pages now and start collecting Enhanced Link Attribution data today.

Posted by Barak Ori, Google Analytics Team