Not a long time ago Google introduced “Enhanced Link Attribution” in order to improve the In-Page Analytics experience. Long anticipated feature by a lot of SEO professionals which despite its obvious benefits is still not used by a large number of people.
What is Enhanced Link Attribution?
If on your Homepage you have got two links – say a button in your header and a text link in your footer – both linking to your About us page, then you see a separate click information for each one of them. “Is this important?” is not even the right question nowadays as the correct question is: What did you do before this update?
Enhanced Link Attribution allows us to comprehensively see how visitors are responding to our design and page structure. In the example above by looking at the different links results we know now if the users are responding better to a button in the header or a text link in the footer. And this is just a simple example.Imagine image from a slider, advertising in the sidebar, article in the middle of the page and a text link in the footer all linking to exactly the same page. Again: “What did you do before this update?” or maybe the question is now evolving into “Are you out of your mind not using it?”.
Other features of Enhanced Link Attribution: See when a page element – like your search box for example – has multiple destinations. Track buttons driven by a javascript.
How to implement?
Add this line in your Google Analytics tracking code:
ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXX-X’);
ga(‘require’, ‘linkid’, ‘linkid.js’);
ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
To enable it into your reports go to Admin, then select the property you want Enhanced Link Attribution enabled and click Property Settings. Almost in the end of the page you will see a section:In-Page Analytics, Use enhanced link attribution. Click apply and you are set to go.
In the end a small drawback of this feature: due to increased details view your reports may generate a bit slower. But you can always turn it off…although I bet you won’t.
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