Using Link Analysis, you can work out what links work best in your articles

Do you know where people are clicking in your article? Do you know which links work best on a page? HBX’s clever link analysis tool can tell you all of this, so that you can work out which links work best in giving your users related information, whether that be linking to other pages within the site, or even to external sites. So how do you do it and what do you do with the results?

Getting the results is easy, working out what to do with them is the difficult bit. To get to the page in HBX you go to Navigation=>Link Analysis=>top links per page, as shown in the image below. This will then give you a page telling you all the pages you have where users have clicked on a link and how many clicks they have done.

This information only really becomes useful though if you drill down to the next level. We want to know the exact links for this page that have been clicked. Well by clicking on the little grey arrow next to the page name (and then on links), you can drill down to the next level. This will tell you all the links that the users have clicked on and which ones are working best.

How does this help you though? You can’t put any more links in it, because you’ve saturated it? Well next time you come to put links in a story, you can think back to this experience. “Hey, I wrote a story on a similar subject x weeks ago,” is what you’ll be thinking, “why don’t I look back at that story to see which links drove traffic onwards in the site and which didn’t.”

Why not also check out doing it in active viewer as well. Then you’ll be able to see a visual effect based on the actual page.