Site overlay is not working, why not?
Rating: +4
The Site Overlay Reporting Tool displays your website with traffic and conversion data added to each page in real time. Data is displayed as a bar on each hyperlink withing a page. Google Analytics creates the Site Overlay by requesting a page from your site, parsing the HTML and overlaying Google Analytics data to the appropriate links. This process is complicated and due to the diverse number of methods used to create web pages has some limitations. The biggest limitation is that the Site Overlay can only be used for static pages with unique links to content located elsewhere on your website, it will not work with dynamically generated content.
Other site construction methods that can affect the Site Overlay functionality include:
* JavaScript links
* CSS content
* Flash navigation
* Downloadable files (.pdf, etc.)
* Outbound links
* Frames
* Auto redirects
* Any dynamically generated content or links
In the above cases, it is common for data to be missing from the site overlay or for data with a value of zero to appear. If there are multiple links on a page that all point to the same place, Google Analytics will total the clicks to on all those links and display the total number for each overlay on each of those common links.
Google Analytics is in the process of solidifying and expanding the functionality of the Site Overlay reporting Tool. However, no timeline is currently available regarding when that might be released or which features will be included.
The site overlay report uses a bot technology (GoogleBot) to request a web page, and displays clicks on standard links that are embedded on that page. Its functionality is currently limited to static pages with unique links to content located elsewhere on the website. Clicks to pages referenced on subdomains or other thirdparty domains cannot be displayed within the Site Overlay report.
If you have a filter that changes your Request URI, such as adding the hostname to the request URI, the Site Overlay report may display 0 in your report, since the Analytics system will no longer be able to associate the pageviews in your reports with the actual link structure within the HTML on your site. For more information about the limitations of Site Overlay, please read Why is my Site Overlay report not working?
