Yet another feature released today for Google Analytics v5, Visualization Flow is something that’s been asked for for years – how to visualise visitors through the site from traffic sources or other dimensions. Google is releasing several visualization tools for Analytics, first off the rank are visitor and goal flow. Each report contains nodes (some aspect of visitors – traffic sources, new visitors, etc) and connections (amount of visitors between nodes). The connections are relative in size, making it easy to see which nodes have the most traffic.

Visitor Flow

This gives a quick visualisation of how visitors from particular traffic sources interact with your site. Immensely powerful for examining success of channels across the sites and to particular pages – great for measuring the success of campaigns and landing pages.

Goal Flow

Awesome. No, really. This shows the interactions in a goal funnel, where people are leaving, are they coming back in or moving between nodes unexpectedly. Because different segments can be applied, and each stage is in the table at the bottom, it is easy to spot problem points in the funnel. The below screenshot demonstrates a funnel where some steps are not mandatory and change under different circumstances – the screenshot shows how visitors are moving between stages as it was not necessary for them to complete every stage and move down the funnel.

A major feature is that now goals are backwards compatible – that is if you set one up today in the current Google Analytics it only processes from today. In the new version, setting one up today will process historic data also. This is huge, as often goals are set in hindsight, especially for campaigns so this is a major fix.

Confused by all the grey spaghetti? or not enough info for the hardened analyst? use the connections slider in the top bar to add or subtract the complexity of the connections

These are fantastic additions to Google Analytics v5 – though a scroll bar for these long funnels will help, I’m having problems viewing all of the goal visualization even on a 27″ monitor! heh just click and drag to move across the flow visualization

How will you use these visualizations?