Google analytics introduce flow visualisation | Digital Clicks Blog
Web developers, SEO experts and even internet marketing experts love the analytics team at Google. This is because they truly listen to their customer’s feedback and provide the tools to match their requirements. In light of this Google analytics released a new method to visualising their insight data last month, entitled flow visualisation. This brilliant representation of data is designed to allow website owners the ability to observe and track with ease how users are operating on their site. This provides an easier method than previously available for internet marketing experts to perform their thorough path and goal analysis on their customers to better understand what they are after and how they go about getting there. So what is the true benefit of this data? Well in fact getting this information is a highly important task for any website that hopes to be successful. Goal analysis allows you to determine what customers are commonly after when entering your website. This allows you to find the content that is the highest sought after and produce more similar material along those lines. Path analysis is the study of how your customers navigate your web page in order to reach these pieces of content. It can be a paramount technique to use when trying to improve the usability or structure of your website. The fewer the number of clicks a user has to navigate through in order to reach your content, the easier it is likely to be for them to do so. By performing these types of analysis you can determine more prominent content types and make it easier and more intuitive for customers to access them. The tool is broken into two useful flows the visitors flow and the goal flow each with their own particular use. The visitors flow is a graphical representation of how visitors flow through the site based on the source. Clever algorithms manipulate and work on this data to group together the most likely flow that visitors will take through the site. The goal flow is a representation of how visitors flow through the goal steps (goal URL’s) laid out by the website owner. These should be based on key pages in your site structure i.e. a product sale page and is a good method of finding out where along the process do the most customers drop away and leave. While already extremely useful, the analytics team at Google has stated that these two views are only their first step, meaning a number of increasingly interesting tools could be in the development pipeline for the future, I am sure SEO experts out there are certainly hoping so.