On October 19th Google announced a new free feature in Google Analytics called Visitors Flow. This feature can easily be accessed at the bottom of the Audience selection in the left-hand navigation. Visitor flow does a great job of visualizing how people move through a website, what content they consume and what pages engage visitors. This same type of visualization can be accessed in the goals funnel as well.
What’s really nice about the new feature is that it easily handles very large data sets, visually lays them out in a clean consumable fashion and allows users to visually dive into the data deeper. The information gathered by this new tool can be very powerful for marketers. That being said, the point of this easily consumed data set is to improve the user’s experience.
If a webmaster can identify which paths through a website creates the most customers (as opposed to the website doing it on its own), then he or she can begin to adjust their content, navigation and calls to action in order to narrow the paths visitors can take. This will optimize their website for customer acquisition over time.
While this visualization is very handy for marketers, its main disadvantage is it lacks the ability to make a website react to the data on its own. If Google Analytics allowed for behavior-triggered custom content to be delivered from multiple channels (website, social, email, mobile, etc.) based on the data in the visualization it might be the only solution a marketer would ever need or want.
For this reason, marketing automation and advanced behavior-triggered nurturing are still needed. For bridging the gap between Google Analyics and marketing automation watch this advanced lead generation analytics video.
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