“Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Currently GA offers two types of visualizers: “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” .The Visitor Flow Report allows you to graphically see the visitor’s navigation through your site. It shows exactly where the users came from, and which page they entered, progressed to, and left from. It is located under the grouping of Audience reports (the last option).
For this blog post, my focus would be on how you can get better visitor insights using Visitors Flow. We will quickly traverse through three cases that can help you gain in-depth insight on your visitors.
How would Visitor flow report help me?
You can view the navigation from almost any dimension, such as country, source, medium, campaign and more. You can further slice it with advanced segments. Let’s take few cases that could help you know your visitors well.
1. Analyze most popular path:
You can analyze the most popular path visitors take. Use this to plan and path your goal which will help you analyze how converting and non-converting users navigate your site. What after this? Well, this will help you making many decisions like: Once you know the most popular path, you can decide the most strategic page (one amongst the most popular path’s pages) for particular advertisement or any content important to visitor’s conversion.
2. Analyze the difference between paths of converting and non-converting visitors:
By analyzing the difference between the path of converting and non-converting visitors, you can gain many insights about what works best. For example, if the visitor A follows path (a->b->c->D) and converts (page D being the conversion page) and on the other hand visitor B follows the path (x->b->z->D) and does not convert , then there could be an issue with pages-x,z or may be the sequence is not working with them. But, this can be concluded if there are quite a few visitors that depict this behavior.
3. Analyze your new visitors:
If your site experiences sudden boom in traffic you can analyze the properties of the new visitors, for example, country, and traffic source like campaign. You can also choose to include all visitors (instead of new visitors) to get the generalized idea of all the visitors.
4. Analyze the properties of frequently converting visitors:
Looking at the country of visitors who convert (visits with transaction), say visitors from Brazil. If there are around 2k visitors who convert but, your site is only in US-English. Considering the number of people converting and the potential of further conversion rate from Brazil you may consider offering your site content in Portugal language as well. This will help you increase you conversions. Although, this is doable using custom reports, but the visual appeal and also the path followed by the visitors is an add on here which can help you gain better insights.
There is much more to this, you can apply various advanced segments, metrics and dimensions to narrow down your results and gain focused and helpful insights. But, to begin with, I hope this would be helpful.
