
How to Track Highlighted Text on Your Site with Google Analytics - richardbaxter
http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-track-highlighted-text/
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reemrevnivek
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..."_

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hammock
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.

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will_critchlow
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).

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

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powertower
[http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/how-to-measure-page-load-
time...](http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/how-to-measure-page-load-time-with-
google-analytics/)

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mooism2
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?

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user24
My MSc thesis was on exactly this - adaptive web sites. It's a fascinating
research topic.

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tdoggette
Did you ever implement anything that we could play with?

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dhuck
the new york times has had something similar to this for years.

you can highlight words and it will show a "question box" that you can click
to see more information about the word, google search, etc. it's displayed
inline so you don't need to navigate away.

it's a nice idea, but it's terribly annoying.

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richardbaxter
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.

