How to See Any User Paths Using Behavior Flow Reports?

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In an earlier post, we have already talked about Behavior flow reports, Tracking a user’s site journey. We had a brief introduction about behavior flow reports, how to use them and why they are so important to track user behavior on your site.

The aim of this article is to take you to the next step and explore some hidden gems of google analytics. We will be talking about how you can map out user paths using behavior flow reports.

 

An Intro to Behavior flow

Behavior Flow reports are extremely helpful  in visually understanding user navigation on the site, where they lands, where they goes, what activity they performs, at what point they exits and so on, all aim at creating an understandable picture of end-user.

 

Access the Behavior Flow report

To access the Behavior Flow report:

  1. Sign in to Google Analytics.

  2. Navigate to your view.

  3. Select the Reporting tab.

Within the report navigation menu select Behavior, then select Behavior Flow .

 accessing behavior flow reports

accessing behavior flow reports

 

Questions Behavior Flow Reports can answer

The Behavior Flow can answer questions like:

  1. Did users go right from product pages to checkout without any additional shopping?

  2. Is there an event that is always triggered first? Does it lead users to more events or more pages?

  3. How do people landing on your blog navigate the website?

  4. What pages is user dropping off the most?

  5. What likely path(s) is user following to complete a successful purchase ?

  6. How good are your campaigns performing, where are they taking the user to ? How often user drop-off after entering the site through different campaigns ?

  7. Scroll tracking is one of the many scenarios where behavior reports may play an essential role in understanding and identifying issues within different flows on site.

 

See where users navigate after viewing a specific page

Let’s understand with an example how people lands on a specific page and where do they navigate next.

We will take the blog page as an example and see how many people drop off at the blog page and how many navigate to next pages on your site.

In order to see this, we will use custom dimension as a landing page enter the page path.

Click on the settings button in the behavior flow reports and select as landing page as shown in the image below.

 custom dimension google analytics

custom dimension google analytics

Here you can add upto 5 page paths and create a forward funnel to see the user navigation after visiting the specific page. To see where users went after the blog page we will enter the blog page path as shown below.

 customize dimension behavior flow

customize dimension behavior flow

Click apply to see where the user navigates to after viewing the blog page.

 behavior flow specific page

behavior flow specific page

From the above chart we can see that almost 90% of users drop off from the blog page. Very people navigating to homepage, tools and next to blog page in the second interaction.

 

Events & Content Grouping Usage

You can also use behavior flow reports to look at events and content group usage? You must have to first set up event tracking and content grouping to view in behavior flow chart.

To see flow reports by events, you have to change the view type as Events

 change view type 

change view type 

Next you will see the behavior few reports by events.

 behavior flow by events

behavior flow by events

or viewing behavior flow as content groupings change the view type as grouped pages. This reduces the noise and allows us to see navigation between different sections of site.

 behavior flow by content groupings

behavior flow by content groupings

 

Conclusion: 

Google analytics disclose a lot of data about the user interaction with your website but its hard to get above it and discover insights. Behavior flow reports show us pages and event interactions visually making it easier to see the forest from the trees. 🙂

 

 

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