San Francisco — Another day of the week means another modification to Google Analytics. So far, Google Analytics did not provided too much information on the way visitors move around a given site. But over the weekend, Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising at Google, at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, announced the addition of new real-time Flow Visualization in Google Analytics that demonstrates how website visitors become customers–and why they do not.
Google Analytics, the search engine giant’s most popular free tool that empowers websites and application developers (or for that matter simply anyone who is concerned with their site’s traffic) to be able to understand traffic information better.
The latest addition is the Flow Visualization reports, dubbed as a tool that offers site owners to quickly analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors navigate across pages on your site.
There are actually two flow visualizations upon launch: Visitors Flow and Goal Flow. These will start unrolling to all accounts of the Google Analytics interface this week. More visualizations will come out later.
Wojcicki, describing the new tool mentioned that although the current Google Analytics provides a lot of data, but not everything the site owners want. “What it does not show is how users are moving around the site and whether they are getting stuck and are they converting? So we wondered how can we show that?” she said.
Wojcicki further stated that inspiration for these new features popped up from an unusual place: Google’s novel concept is based on the 19th century historian Charles Minard’s famous visualization of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign into Russia, which specifies how many soldiers continued, deflected, returned, and so on and the losses incurred along the way, Wojcicki said. It displays time and motion, and it tells a story, she added.
However, the age old information is still static, she acknowledged. So Google took the information and made it “dynamic,” Wojcicki explained, by integrating this style of diagram and renaming it as “flow visualization.”
“What makes the flow visualization so powerful is that it takes data and tells a story that is understood within seconds,” said Wojcicki.
To begin using the new features, Visitors Flow is located under the Visitors section of the Standard Reporting tab, and Goal Flow can be found under the the Goals subsection of Conversions, also under the Standard Reporting tab.
With flow visualization, Google Analytics users can get a graphical representation of traffic through their Web sites. (Credit: Google)
Visitors Flow helps site owners visualize the paths visitors navigate through your site by traffic source or other dimensions, as well as view the path they take to the exit. Typically this includes the source, landing page, exit page and the pages in between. The report shows the relative volume of visits to your site and relative volume of views per page or for a collection of pages. This could be a pretty helpful tool in analyzing bounces and exits and useful for trying to reduce them. This visualization is shown in the image above.
Moreover, these reports are not only pretty graphical, they are interactive too. Rolling over data points (known as nodes) displays drill-down information in a pop-up. For instance, a pop-up might display the number of pages or visitors for a particular node or how many visitors exited or dropped out at that node with a mini pie graph. Because the representations can get large, the interface provides controls for zooming the report. There is also controls for panning the angle and filtering to limit the number of connections between nodes.
“Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site,” explains Phil Mui of the Google Analytics team. “You will also notice that we made the visualization highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.”
The Goal Flow Report, pictured below, represents the paths visitors take while on your site that displays how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off.
“Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site,” says Mui. “In this first iteration, we are supporting only URL goals, but we will soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.”
In addition, Mui added that Goal Flow helps you understand the relative volume of visits by dimension (traffic, source, campaign, browser), the rates at which visitors abandon different paths, where and how visitors navigate the steps you define, and how they interact with your site (in terms of things like backtracking to previous goal steps).
Mui said these two reports “are only the first step in tackling flow visualization for visitors through a site.” Any advanced segments can be applied to a Flow Visualizer, and you can even visualize “backward” to see reverse paths to “identify suboptimal content,” he added. More visualization reports are apparently coming down the pike.
“You do not want to know about that two hours from now, you want to know about that right now,” she said.
Listen to Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising at Google, describes the new enhancements: