Google Analytics Behavior Flow Report – Unpacked

Have you ever wondered what users do once they are on your website. Which page they start on and how they travel around your site, clicking from page to page? Are you interested in understanding what kind of content keeps users engaged with your site? Well the Google Analytics Behavior Flow Report can help you answer these questions and more!

Here is an example of the Behavior Flow Report

mobile search

The green boxes are called “Page Nodes” and the grey lines flowing between the nodes are what Google calls “Connections”. In the example above 207 users landed on the site. 206 of them went to the homepage and 1 went to the “our process” page. Now the cool thing about the Behavior Flow Report is that you can either highlight or explore traffic through a specific page. So, if we wanted to explore how users flow into or out of the “contact us” page – it would look like this:

mobile search

And if we wanted to drill down further and look at the path the one user who submitted a contact us form took we can highlight that path – which looks like this:

mobile search

Anyway, as you can see the Behavior Flow Report is a powerful tool that can help you investigate how engaged users are with your content and to identify potential content issues. The Behavior Flow Report can answer questions like:

What pages should you strengthen or try an experiment on because you’re seeing a lot of drop-offs?
Are users following the paths through your site that you want them to take? Or are there other more popular paths that you need to capitalize on?

You can find the Behavior Flow Report in Google Analytics by going to the left hand column and clicking to open the “Behavior” drop-down, then click on “Behavior Flow” – it is the second choice – right below the “Overview”.

Anyway, this is just a primer on the Behavior Flow Report – so dig in and see what you can find out about how users are interacting with your site.

by Josh Becerra

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