Google Analytics: Follow Your Visitors’ Navigation Patterns

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Google Analytics has a cool feature that I thought I’d share with you. It allows you to see at a glance where your visitors have been on your website. You can follow their navigation from entrance to exit, seeing each page’s bounce rate and entrance and exit links at a glance.

Here’s how you access this feature in Google Analytics:

1. Log in to Google Analytics account
2. Click on the account and website you want to analyze
3. Scroll down to the Content Overview box and click “view report”
4. Click on the Navigation Summary link

Here you can see what percentages of your visitors entered any particular page on your site and what percentage came to each page from previous pages. You can also see how many visitors exited from each page and what percentage went on to view other pages as well as which specific pages those visitors came from and went. This data is available for each page on your website.

At the top of your stats, below the graph, you can see how many page views each page had for the time period you are measuring. This is good information to not only make improvement to your website but also see how effective your search engine optimization efforts are over a period of time.

This information is very valuable in telling you how each page on your website relates to other pages. It can also tell you whether your ‘s structure is working for you. Are people leaving your most important landing pages without visiting other pages on your website? Are they coming to your most important landing pages from other pages on your site that you didn’t anticipate? Perhaps you can find a way to capitalize on that information.