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Viewing the paths that visitors take through your web site

Christine Cahoon   Mon 20 May 2013   updated: Wed 22 May 2013

The best report that shows you how visitors navigate through your web site is the Content -> Visitors Flow report. This report is a graphical representation of the paths visitors took through your site, from the source, through the various pages, and where along their paths they exited your site.

By default, you can see where they came from by Country/Territory. However, there are different dimensions that you can select to compare volumes of traffic from different sources, such as:

  • Advertising by Campaign or Keywords
  • Social by Social Network
  • Traffic Sources by Source (google, bing, ask...) or Medium (organic or paid)
  • Visitors by Browser, City, Operating System

The flow diagram shows the dimension they have come from, then the starting pages, first interaction (next page) and second interaction (next after the first page they have visited). Selecting, for example, within the Country/Territory dimension, United Kingdom, a box appears with three options, the first one: Highlight traffic through here - lets you see the visitors flow from this country to the different pages.

Hovering over a green box that contains the path of the starting page where they arrived from the United Kingdom displays the number of Through traffic (those who have continued onto another page) and the number of Drop-offs (those who have left the site).

For more information, see Google's help pages on Visitors Flow report and How to analyze your data with the Visitors Flow.