How to Use Page Overlay
The page overlay shows analytics data directly on your website.
By doing this, you bring your visitors' experience closer and help them understand traffic patterns.
Page overlay can be initiated from the Behavior > Pages report rows. Just move the mouse over the page you want to see the overlay for and click the bubble icon. It will open the page overlay in a new tab.
The page overlay displays the actual website and places bubbles next to links on the page that show how many visitors clicked the link:
Next to your website is a sidebar with additional data and actions:
- Additionally, you can choose the date range for which the page overlay should show statistics. It contains several shortcuts that are much easier to use than a full date picker. The default date range is "Current Month": When you start the page overlay, this date range will always be selected, regardless of the date that was selected in MVMCloud Analytics when the overlay session was started.
- Below the date picker, you can see the page you are viewing. The location shown here corresponds to the URLs of page shown in the page report, so ignored parameters will not be included here;
- The “Key metrics” section shows the data you would see in the corresponding row of the pages report;
- At the bottom you can start the line actions that you would also see in the pages report: Line Evolution and Transitions.
You can click on links within the site and Page Overlay will update the sidebar and also show analytics data for every page you visit (as long as it has the MVMCloud Analytics tracker). And it doesn't just show internal link data, it even works for downloads and external links.
When you hover over a link, the destination URL is shown in the bottom right corner. Additionally, you can see the absolute number of clicks and how many links point to exactly the same location.
It's important to understand that the Page Overlay feature doesn't actually record the link click. Instead, it uses the data that MVMCloud Analytics collects to determine which pages were viewed directly after visiting the current page. If there are multiple links to this page, it cannot tell which link has been used how many times. That's why the Page Overlay feature shows how many links point to that location, and also highlights the bubbles next to the other links when you hover over one of them.
MVMCloud Analytics's Page Overlay feature allows you to see link performance by looking at your actual site. With this view, you can obtain additional information, such as which areas of the site perform better or worse than others.