Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Google Analytics Gains "Napoleon's March" Flow Visualization Charts


Google Analytics announced a new set of reports that should help marketers and website owners to understand how users behave on their websites. The feature was presented this morning during Web 2.0 Summit, on a keynote delivered by Susan Wojcicki (SVP of Google, Advertising) & Phil Mui (Group Product Manager, Google Analytics). This feature is an interesting solution to an old problem: analyzing paths throughout a website in a scalable way.
Path analysis has historically been a feature that provided little insights on user behavior, mainly because visitors behave in such non linear ways that it is hard to learn something from their paths, even when looking at aggregated data. The best option to path analysis has been to analyze micro conversions, i.e. looking at each page and trying to learn if the page has fulfilled its objective. However, the visualizations below bring some interesting approaches that will be very helpful for web analysts.

Google Analytics Gains "Napoleon's March" Flow Visualization Charts
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