How To Use Google Analytic’s Behavioral Flow Tool

What Is The Behavioral Flow Tool In Google Analytics?

The Behavior Flow tool is a feature in Google Analytics that documents the pages, events and actions that users take while exploring your site. This tool easily aggregates the data to then show you the most common paths that users take while browsing your site.

Why Is The Behavior Flow Tool Important?

This allows you to measure your conversion paths with ease, giving you a deeper understanding of users, how they interact with your website or app. You can also add further investigate user activity by getting a granular look at interactions such as video players, downloads, form submission, etc. You can also measure the number of essential business actions that users complete (called Goal Conversions), as well as eCommerce transactions and purchases.

Why Does user experience matter for Paid Media Campaigns?

Optimization for paid ads should not just stop at the ad network level. We find that user experience highly correlates to conversion rate. In some instances, we have been to increase conversion by huge multiples just by testing and changing landing page elements. The Behavior Flow tool is instrumental in website experience optimizations because it allows you to identify barriers to conversion as well as find out which actions are most important to increase the chances of them happening. With this data, you can then take action to decrease the amount of time it takes to complete the conversion or creating new pages/resources that could assist in the conversion path.

Where Do I Find The Behavioral Flow Tool in Google Analytics?

First, In your Google Analytics Dashboard select “Behavior” on the left navigation bar and click “Behavior Flow”

To analyze traffic through the most landed on the website page, right-click on your trackpad and select “highlight traffic through here”.

To get a list of pages visited within a “grouping” of interactions right-click and select “group details” this will bring up a pop-up detailing the top pages within that interaction.

With this information, you can begin to explore the Behavior Flow tool. While your site will most likely vary in page grouping you will find that there are infinite combinations of user paths. For that reason I recommend you add a segment to better analyze the flow in line with the goal you are trying to understand. When analyzing the data be sure to analyze the most common interactions first to identify user path behavior that could lead to the insight that can increase conversion.

For more information or help identifying customer behavior drop us a comment below and our UX team will be sure to get back to you with a response!