Find out where the user has come from -- previous page URL within the same site

Question

Is it possible to use Google Analytics or a similar tool to track the users' inter-site click behaviour?

I'd like to know how many users clicked on certain links on a particular page which lead them to a different area of the site.

e.g. if users always click on "Contact Us" link after reading "About Us", then we can reason that "About Us" page makes the visitors want to call us.

The question is how do I find out how many visits to the 'contact-us.html' page are from 'about-us.html' (without appending parameters like ?source=aboutus to the URL) ?

Some kind of statistics like:

Statistics for contact-us.html 
------------------------------
Previous Page | Clicks 
--------------|---------
about-us.html | 250
index.html    | 123
history.html  | 0     <--- probably remove the link on history.html page

Solution 1

Use the "Navigation Summary" to work out which internal page a visitor reached your page from:

1. Choose 'Content' and then 'Content by Title' from the Analytics menu:

   

2. Click whichever page title you're interesting in learning more about:

   

3. Click the page URL in the Content Performance table:

   

4. Click 'Navigation Summary' under the 'Navigation Analysis' header:

   

That's it! You'll see a summary of internal entrance pages on the left hand side for that page, and internal exit pages on the right hand side. The 'previous pages' column on the left tells you where visitors to that page came from, exactly as you've asked for:

Note that the "35.15% Entrances" information on the screenshot above tells me that 35.15% of people arrived at my site via that page (i.e. they didn't come to it from another internal page).

Solution 2

Google Analytic's "In-page" analytics feature is what you're after, I believe. It allows you to browse your website like any other user (within google analytics), and every link displays a number of vistitors that clicked that link (and a percentage) next to it. Handy for doing the exact type of analytics you mentioned.

Comments

[ytk]

Thanks for the detailed answer! Exactly what I'm looking for.