Reading the Paths Visitors Take Between Pages

The route owners picture

Ask an owner how visitors use their website and the answer is usually a straight line: home page, then a service page, then the contact form.

Some visitors do exactly that. Most do not. They arrive on a page deep inside the site from a search, look at one or two others, and leave from somewhere the owner rarely thinks about.

Analytics records those routes. The Behavior Flow report, under Behavior in the left-hand menu, draws them as a diagram, and it is easy to overlook.

It looks complicated at first. Read with a few questions in mind, it is one of the most useful reports a small business has.

How the diagram works

The left-hand column groups visits by a starting point you choose, such as the source or the landing page.

The next column shows the pages where visits began, and each column after that is one more step through the site.

Grey bands show the flow from one page to the next, thicker where more visits took that route. A red band dropping away below a page shows the visits that ended there.

Pages with similar addresses are grouped into a single box, which can hide detail. Clicking a box offers to show the pages inside it, or to highlight only the traffic passing through it.

What the report usually shows

• Visits starting on a blog post, not the home page.
• Loops between two pages, such as services and prices.
• Exits from the gallery, where the photos end and nothing follows.
• Visits that never leave the first page, often from phones.
• Direct trips to the contact page, usually from returning customers.

The second is the most revealing. People who go back and forth between two pages are looking for something that should be on one of them, and the report tells you which pair.

Choose the routes that matter

The diagram shows every route at once, which is why it overwhelms. Most of them do not matter.

Pick three or four: the most common landing pages, the route to the contact form or booking page, and whichever page sends the most visits away.

On a small site, use a date range of a few months, so each route is made of enough visits to mean something. A route a handful of people took in one week tells you very little.

A worked example

A sewing school runs beginner, dressmaking and alteration classes in a studio above a row of shops, six students at a time, and takes registrations through its website.

The owner assumed visitors went from the home page to the class schedule to the registration form. The report showed three other routes doing most of the work.

The largest group arrived on an old blog post about hemming jeans, which ranked well in search, and most of them left from it.

Another group went back and forth between the schedule and a separate prices page. A third ended at the gallery of students' projects.

The causes were plain once seen. The hemming post never mentioned the beginner class. The schedule had no prices. The gallery had no link to the classes that produced the work.

The fixes took an afternoon: a short paragraph at the end of the post linking to the beginner class, prices beside each class on the schedule, and a caption under each project naming its class, with a link.

Fixing dead ends

A dead end is a page that answers a question and then offers nothing to do next. Blog posts, galleries, about pages and thank-you pages are the usual ones.

Each needs one obvious next step matching what the visitor was just reading: the class, the service, the quote form. The menu at the top of the page is not that step.

Resist putting a large button on every page. One relevant link, in the text where the reader's attention already is, is more likely to be followed than another box in the sidebar.

Loops point to missing information

When the report shows visits moving from one page to another and back again, open the two pages side by side.

Usually one has information the other needs: prices kept apart from services, a schedule kept apart from the location, a product kept apart from its delivery details.

Putting the missing piece where people look for it ends the loop. The next time you open the report, that band should be thinner.

Checking one page at a time

For a single page, the Navigation Summary is easier to read. In the All Pages report, choose a page and open the Navigation Summary tab above the chart.

It shows which pages led to the one you chose and which pages people opened after it, along with the share of visits that ended there. For a gallery or a popular blog post, that is often all you need.

What the report cannot tell you

Behavior Flow shows routes, not reasons.

It cannot say why someone left the gallery, only that they did, and a visitor who left to phone you looks exactly the same as one who gave up.

It counts visits rather than people, and on larger date ranges it may draw the diagram from a sample. Treat it as a map of where to look, then look at the pages themselves.

The counter-case

A site with very few visits will not produce routes worth reading. A dozen visits a week spread across forty pages is mostly noise; an hour improving the pages themselves will do more.

A site of three or four pages has few routes to study, and its visitors' choices are visible enough in the ordinary pages report.

For any site with a blog, a gallery and a handful of service pages, though, the report earns an hour every few months: find the routes that matter, and fix the places people stop.

This month

1. Open Behavior Flow for the last three months.
2. Note the top landing pages by visits.
3. Find the biggest red drop after each.
4. Look for pairs of pages visited back and forth.
5. Add one relevant next step to each dead end.
6. Move missing information to where people look.
7. Recheck the report in two months.

Step five is where the report turns into work. A blog post or gallery with one sensible link onward gives visitors somewhere to go other than away.

Weighing those routes by what each enquiry is worth is covered in giving each enquiry goal a dollar value.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.