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On Rap Genius you can click the orange lyrics to read pop-up explanations:
However, I'm sure some visitors don't know that the orange lyrics are clickable. I'd like to figure out what percentage of visitors to song pages on Rap Genius do not click a single orange lyric before leaving
Right now I fire a Google Analytics event whenever someone opens an explanation, but I don't know how to use this data to answer my underlying question.
You can use Google Analytics Goals for this. It will be visible as the abandonment rate of a certain funnel.
You can also use the new InPage Analytics to see how many clicks the lyrics are getting.
You could build this in to your existing scripting. When a new vistor goes to your site, have your script (php, asp, ruby) request the vistors ip. Then each time they click on an actual lyric detail then you would log that into a database also.. This way you can tell exactly who is clicking what.
Assuming you have Google Analytics tracking the content in the lyrics pages as well, you might find better results by using a conversion funnel. You can use regular expressions when setting up the funnel information so you should be able to match all of your song pages as the first step in the funnel and your lyric pages as your final step in the funnel.
I don't think using an event will work since each user could generate the event more then once the data won't have the information you are looking for (IE you could have 10 users 5 don't visit any lyrics pages, and the other 5 each visit 2 different lyric pages, the data would then show 10 users and 10 events, but you wouldn't have 100% click through rate.)
Another option if you have access to your log files would be to find all unique IPs that requested a song page then take that list and see how many of those IPs also requested a lyrics page.
Along with InPage Analytics and Goals and funnels, afore mentioned, I also think a heat map tracking tool is a really nice idea to analyze what and how people are using your site.
if you fire that analytics event, I would make it sure, that it gets fired at most once per visit. This way, you have the number of total visits and how many times the event occured. This brings you hopefully further, because you will see, how often your feature is used compared to the total number of visits.
To make sure, that your event will fire only once, you have to remove the event handler in the handling function itself.
Best wishes,
Adam
