Understand the visitor flow

Where to find the Visitor flow report

In the side menu, click "Behavior".

A submenu opens. Choose "Visitor flow" there.

The Visitor flow report opens.

When you should check here

Whenever single numbers are no longer enough and you want to understand the route behind them. The Pages report tells you a page was visited 500 times. Nice. But it does not reveal what happened before and after.

That is exactly where the visitor flow comes in. It answers questions like: is the newsletter bringing anybody to my offer page at all? Where do visitors click after my best blog article? And at which point in the checkout do they bail out, right before it gets serious?

First: pick a page

Everything revolves around one page that you choose yourself. At the top under "Analyze page:" you select it:

• Click the selection field. A list of your pages opens, sorted by page views. So the most visited ones sit at the top.
• Through the search field ("Search page…") you find a specific page in seconds, even if you have hundreds of them.

Right next to the selection, you see this page's key figures at a glance:

Below the selection field sits the page title of the page you picked, so you can be sure you have the right one in front of you.

The two views

In the top right you switch between two views. Both show the flow, but from a different angle.

Transitions

Here the page you picked sits in the middle. On the left you see where the visitors came from (the "sources"), and on the right where they went afterward (the "destinations"). Like a train station: the trains arrive on one side and head onward on the other.

Sources (where did they come from?), grouped by origin:

• Internal pages (other pages on your own website)
• Search engines (search engines like Google)
• External website (links from other sites)
• Campaign (your tagged campaign links)
• Social networks
• Direct (somebody types in your address or comes through a bookmark)

Destinations (where did they go?), grouped by what happened next:

• Internal pages (onward on your website)
• External links (a click that leads away from your site)
• Downloads
• Exit (the visit ends here)
• Reloaded (the same page again)

What you can do with it:

• Hover over a source or a destination with your mouse. A short sentence explains the number in plain words, and below it you see the exact values for that group.
• In the middle (the "atom card") sit the metrics of the page you picked: page views, unique views, bounce rate, and time on page. Hover over a source or a destination, and the atom card switches and shows you the values for exactly that source or destination.
• On a phone, sources and destinations appear as two switchable lists ("Sources" and "Destinations") so everything stays readable.

That way you see at a glance: which channel washes visitors onto this page, and what do they do afterward? Do they go deeper into your website, or are they right back out?

Path explorer

Now it gets precise. Instead of only one step forward and back, here you follow the whole route. Click by click, as a sequence of columns from left to right.

First you choose the direction (top left, two buttons):

Here is how you work your way through:

1. The first column is the page you picked.
2. Click an entry in the next column to follow the path onward. The next step opens up.
3. If a step has many branches, pull in more entries with "Show more".
4. When a route is finished, it says "No further step".

A few more handy moves:

• Reset path (the circular arrow icon at the top) takes the explorer back to the beginning.
• The counter in the top right shows you how many visitors took exactly this path.
• The first time you open it, a small note appears reminding you to click an entry to explore the route.

That way you see whether your visitors arrive where you want them. And if not, at which point they take the wrong turn.

Filtering

Through "Add filter" at the top you narrow the visitor flow down to a specific group in both views, by:

• Referrer (the kind of origin)
• Country, city, language
• Browser, provider

With that you answer questions that otherwise stay pure gut feeling. Do visitors from Canada move through your site differently than visitors from the US? Do visitors from one particular campaign take a different route? Active filters appear as small "chips" and can be clicked away one by one.

Aha moments you will recognize

A few situations where the visitor flow suddenly gives you something real:

• Your best blog article leads nowhere. It has plenty of visitors, which makes you happy. But in the destinations, you see that nearly all of them exit afterward. Nobody clicks onward to your offer. A good article that brings visitors in but does not pass them along. A link at the end of the text could move a lot here.
• The checkout breaks off at one particular point. You follow the route in the path explorer and see that plenty of visitors disappear between "Cart" and "Payment". Something is off right there. Maybe the shipping fee surprises them, maybe the form is too long.
• A channel brings visitors, but not good ones. In the sources you see a lot of traffic from social media. Sounds great. But nearly all of those visitors bounce right away, while your search engine visitors keep clicking onward nicely. Now you know where your effort really pays off.
• Visitors take a detour you never planned. Instead of going straight from the offer to the order, plenty of them first jump back to the home page or the FAQ page. A sign that they are missing a piece of information. And that information belongs on the offer page.

What is in it for me?

The visitor flow shows you the route instead of just single numbers. And that is where the real value sits:

• What works? You see which channels bring visitors to your important pages.
• Where do they go on, where do you lose them? The destinations and exits show it per page.
• Where do visitors take a wrong turn? The path explorer uncovers detours and drop-offs you would never have spotted in any single number.

Other reports tell you how many came. The visitor flow tells you what they did afterward. And from that you read where to tackle your website next.

Common questions

What is the difference between the transitions and the path explorer?
The transitions show you the single step: from this page to that one. Always one jump. The path explorer strings those jumps together and shows the whole route across several pages. If you want to know quickly where things go from one page, take the transitions. If you want to see the complete journey, take the path explorer.

Why do I see so few destinations on some pages?
Because many visits simply end on that page. On a contact or thank you page, that is perfectly normal. On a page in the middle of the buying process, it should make you sit up.

What does "Direct" mean as a source?
The visitor came with no recognizable referrer because they typed in your address or used a bookmark, for example. Sometimes a click from an app or an email is behind it too, one that passes along no origin.

Does reloading a page really count as its own step?
Yes. If somebody loads the same page again, it turns up as "Reload". If that happens strikingly often, something may be stuck: a long load time or a form that does not submit cleanly.

Can I set several filters at once?
Yes. You combine country and language, for example, to filter out one very specific group. Every active filter appears as a chip and can be removed individually.

What do the percentages on the connections mean?
The percentage tells you what share of the visitors from a page took that particular route. If 100 people went to your home page and 60 of them went on to the pricing page, it says 60%. That way you see right away which route is the most popular and which one is barely used.