What Links Did You Click On?

April 2, 2010

Photo by Will Montague

April Fool’s Day is over and life on the interwebz has gone back to normal. We can go back to reading blog posts without questioning their validity. We can click on links without fear of being Rickrolled (go ahead – click on it, I dare you).

Our post from yesterday was fun, short, and completely 100% false. But it did give us a chance to do some testing (what kind of web analysts would we be if we didn’t throw in a bit of research?). In our Fool’s Day post, we linked to the Rick Astley music video – “Never Gonna Give You Up” – masking it as a link to an announcement from Google about things that would get your site banned. We linked to it in three places – the first paragraph, second paragraph and in the last sentence.

Side note: I thought it was bad when “The Wheels on the Bus” song got stuck in my head for a week. That was nothing compared to 2 days of Astley.

We tagged each link with an onclick event to see how many of you took the bait, and which bait you took. Here are the numbers:

Pageviews – 255

Unique pageviews – 171

Link 1 – 54 clicks
(anchor text: “Read the full announcement here”)

Link 2 – 23 clicks
(anchor text: “specific features listed”)

Link 3 – 19 clicks
(anchor text: “the announcement”)

Not surprisingly, the first link got the lion’s share of clicks. This is a good reminder for your next newsletter, press release, e-mail or blog post: put the important information (and links) at the top.