How to Track Highlighted Text on Your Site with Google Analytics

http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-track-highlighted-text/

by richardbaxter • 15 years ago

38 16 15 years ago

seogadget.co.uk

This is smart. Wish I'd thought of this. I love hacking GA to do fun stuff. My recent favourite is tracking real page load time (i.e. not just server response times but actual user load times in the wild).

herrherr• 15 years ago

Perhaps you can give us an example on how to implement this. I would be really interested in it.

powertower• 15 years ago

http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/how-to-measure-page-load-time...

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

Any chance you could share that knowledge? That sounds fantastically awesome!

mooism2• 15 years ago

How about, when someone highlights text on your site, it immediately searches itself and presents the results in the margin? (Without causing the page to reflow or otherwise getting in the way.) Perhaps with links to search Google/Wikipedia/etc as well? Too creepy?

user242• 15 years ago

My MSc thesis was on exactly this - adaptive web sites. It's a fascinating research topic.

tdoggette• 15 years ago

Did you ever implement anything that we could play with?

joebananas• 15 years ago

nytimes.com used to do something like this. It was super annoying.

hammock2• 15 years ago

I use a FF extension called FastestFox which takes highlighted text and automagically pulls a snippet from wikipedia and/or the dictionary (it is smart enough to know which) in addition to offering the option of searching it in one of several configurable search engines. Very helpful when browsing. And works way better than when the NYTimes tried it.

icegreentea• 15 years ago

That stuff is absolute hell for people who compulsively highlight the text they're reading. So are all the sites with links everywhere that pop up a little social networking/other articles windows on highlight.

richardbaxter• 15 years ago

It's awesome is what it is. I wonder if you can pull the 1,2 and 3 word terms via the Google Analytics API? I'd betempted to use that data to generate popular search pages / navigation and internal link changes.

reemrevnivek• 15 years ago

As I browse, I compulsively select paragraphs of text. I imagine that this habit could cause some interesting data problems, if done on a site which tries to track such actions.

Does anyone else highlight as they read without searching, i.e. how valid is their assumption: We all know, or at least suspect, that people on our sites are highlighting text, right clicking on it and selecting "Search Google For..."

hammock2• 15 years ago

I do that ALL the time, and I too was thinking that it would give you a bunch of garbage data.

But then I was also thinking, it could give you some useful measure of where people's eyes happened to be on the page- which copy they were reading and which they were skipping over.

dkokelley• 15 years ago

I'm not the only one! I didn't think about users searching for text, but I did think that this could be useful to learn how much users are interacting with my site. (ie. Are they losing interest half way down a page? Are they drawn away from the main content body? Etc.)

How to Track Highlighted Text on Your Site with Google Analytics

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