Many of you have shared with us difficulties you’ve experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don’t sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You’re looking for better ways to visualize and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.

The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualizing visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

This morning at Web 2.0 Summit, Susan Wojcicki & I unveiled the release of “Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualizers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualizer on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.



Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

You’ll 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.



This type of visualization allows you to answer important questions, such as “How successful is my new promo page?” In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the “specials” or promo page come from Google search.

To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by “exploring the traffic” through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.



We realize that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we’re providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualizer to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.


Goal Flow

Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for 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. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.



You can find the Goal Flow visualizer in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.” Goal Flow helps you understand:

• The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)
• The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways
• Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined
• How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualizer. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize “backward”. Such “reverse paths” could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, “forward” paths from a page (or pages) can be visualized to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.




Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common “visitor” flows, and we’re building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.

If you don’t have goals or goal funnels already set up, don’t worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.

These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualization for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualization truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

I’m very excited to announce that the new version of Google Analytics is now available to all Google Analytics users in all languages. When you sign into Google Analytics you’ll see a link to the new version in the top right of your account.

If you haven’t, we encourage you to try the new version today. There’s a host of new features to help you do better analysis. We’re also constantly making updates to the new version.

Here’s a five things to try in Google Analytics v5:

• Create an additional dashboard to focus on your important metrics
• Set up an Event Goal to track interactions like downloads and video engagement
• Graph and compare any two rows over time with Plot Rows
• Check out your favorite report (Did it move? Our Report Finder can help)
• Flip between your different profiles and sites while staying focused on the same report

So what happens next? You’ll continue to have access to both versions of Google Analytics, and you can switch between them at any time. If you find anything that doesn’t work or could be better, let us know. We especially want to hear about issues that force you back to the current version. We’re still hard at work on enabling a few features from the old version including PDF export and email scheduling, and they’ll be coming soon.

Take some time this week to try the new Google Analytics, and let us know what you think. We’ll continue making improvements and adding functionality. Next week, we’ll be covering how to use custom reports in the new version.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Earlier today at the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco, we shared a look at a new version of Google Analytics. We’ve also reached out to a small group of Analytics users to participate in the testing. If you’re part of this group you’ll see a link to the new version in your Analytics account. We’re starting small, and we’ll gradually roll the new version out to everyone.

Our goals for the new version are to make it easier and faster to get to the data you want and to enhance the Google Analytics platform to bring you major new functionality. Many of the changes in the new version are the result of your feedback. For example, you can now view multiple advanced segments without needing to also use All Visits. You’ll find some of the other most requested features like multiple dashboards in the new version as well.

We’ll be sharing many more details about what’s new along the way with a new series on the blog focused exclusively on the new Analytics. In the meantime, if you want to be considered for the test, visit the beta sign-up page. Using the new version won’t change how Google Analytics reports your website traffic, and you can continue to use the current version while testing the new Analytics.

As you start using the new Google Analytics, you should also check out the updated Google Analytics Help Center and the Report Finder, which will show you where to find your favorite reports in the new version. We’ve also set up a new category in the Help Forum where you can ask questions and discuss the new version.

This release wouldn’t have been possible without your feedback. Please continue to send us your feedback as you start using the new interface.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

When looking at Google Analytics reports, sometimes it’s difficult to visualize how visitors navigate on a given website page. To make this visualization easier, some users keep the website open in another browser tab so they can reference it while looking through reports. Others rely on the Site Overlay report in Google Analytics, which, admittedly, hasn’t worked as well it could.

Today, we’re happy to share with you a bit of what we’ve been working on to address this problem. We’re releasing a new feature into beta: In-Page Analytics. With In-Page Analytics, you can see your Google Analytics data superimposed on your website as you browse.



Take In-Page for a spin and let us know what you think. In-Page Analytics is still in beta, so some things in the report may not work perfectly yet. There’s a lot left to do, but there’s even more that we want to build going forward. In-Page is currently available for all English users of Google Analytics. We also have a demo video that walks you through the feature and how you might use it.

You’ll find the In-Page Analytics report in the Content section in your Google Analytics account, and it replaces Site Overlay. You can read more about In-Page in the Google Analytics Help Center. Let us know what you think and how you’re using it!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team