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New Analytics Visual Flow Tools Announced by Google

 In SEO, Technical SEO

Google just announced a new tool in the Google Analytics kit, called “Flow Visualization.” It is designed to help you better understand visitor paths through your site and will likely be revolutionary for advertisers and site owners of all kinds.

Are you using Google Analytics on your site (or any other form of visitor tracking and analysis)? Do you find that the main challenge is what to do with all that visitor and traffic data? Your goal should be to find a manageable number of reports that give you clear, actionable information at a glance. Flow Visualization, which records customer activity on websites, will make it exponentially easier to distinguish what is successful on your websites from what is not.

For a long time, a huge issue for website owners has been the inability to differentiate the successful from the unsuccessful in their content and promotions. Advertisers and site owners could not know specifically why or how customers were drawn to specific content or Web pages, or what may have turned customers off — leaving no clear idea of where to invest resources for site enhancements.

As Google’s announcement points out, traditional path analysis tools fall short. They often do not group related visitor paths and pages in any usable, actionable way and segmentation analysis can be difficult. We have long needed better ways to visualize and quickly identify actionable conclusions or observations about how the flow of visitors through our sites.

Rather than build more individual “path analysis” tools, Google’s new Flow Visualization, enables advertisers and website-owners to see at a glance, graphically, which parts of their website are working and which are not. It records the number of people on a website, as well as the customer’s paths on that site, so the advertisers’ can gain insight into the psychology of the customers and continuously enhance their websites.

Beginning this week, Google is rolling out “Vistors Flow” and “Goal Flow” to all accounts. More will be coming soon.

The Visitors Flow tool will offer a graphical view of visitors’ journey through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see where they their traveled, stopped, and where they exited. When it comes to you, it will be on the left hand navigation menu, under the Visitors section.

Goal Flow will highlight how visitors step through your goal stages and where they abandoned it.

You can find a full explanation in Google’s announcement and in Google’s individual help articles on the new Flow reports and on the Goal Flow Report.

Without Analytics in general, you can’t measure the success of your site as a whole and will have no sense of where you successfully engage with visitors or what attracts new one. With Flow Visualization tools you can quickly see the successful routes through your site and make informed decisions on next steps and development. If you haven’t yet implemented analytics on your Web site, do it today. And of course, let us know if we can help!

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