While you may think that your website is user-friendly, you cannot be sure until you interact with visitors that browse through your site. Even though you may have a lot of experience in navigating your own website, visitors that arrive for the first time may not know how to do the same.
Luckily, Google Analytics offers the Visitors Flow report that can help analyze just how difficult or easy it is for visitors to navigate around your website. This report will help you understand if visitors merely bounce all over your website or whether they find navigation easy and quickly enter your conversion path.
You will find the Visitors Flow report under the “Audience” sub-heading under the “Reports and more” section of Google Analytics. The consecutive report page can seem a bit confusing, but you should understand that the report is displayed from left to right. Every column on your screen displays the interaction between your website and the visitor. You can select the number of pages that you wish to view without any restrictions.
You can customize the Visitors Flow report to suit your requirements. For instance you can view and analyze only paid search traffic if you wish to do so by clicking on the Customize button and then choosing the medium of traffic that needs to be analyzed. In addition, you can filter your report for visitors based on location, devices, different sources of traffic, etc.
You can opt for a more in-depth analysis by selecting the “Highlight traffic through here” option, which allows you to analyze traffic for any chosen page. The Google Analytics visitor flow report uses several colors in its reports for easier interpretation. For instance purple indicates product pages while red indicates the lead form page. The report also features arrows in various colors and you will certainly get a hang of interpreting the results in a short time.
You may just be surprised at the actual reason for high bounce rates or low conversion rates once you begin analyzing your website by using the Visitors Flow report. Regular analysis as well as improved optimization based on the Visitors Flow report will help you provide improved visitor experience as well as boost conversion rates.