Google Analytics have today announced their new visualation tool at Web 2.0 summit called…..wait for it….
Flow Visualizations (or Flow Visualisations if you’re British)
If you have used pathing reports in other analytics tools you know it can be a very frustrating experience to get data out of some of them. There are several tools who have a pathing reports that can provide really useful data. Often though, especially with complex websites what you’ll find is a messy diagram in front of you and no insights. Back to the pivot table.
Google Analytics decided to take some time on their research for the Flow Visualisation report. Developing and building this with a Google Maps like interface that is interactive and to be honest quite stunning to look at. So lets open unwrap the tool.
1. Vistiors Flow
This shows visually how visitors are flowing through your site, and you can select key dimensions such as traffic source, keyword, custom variables, events and other dimensions. You can also apply advanced segments so that your analysis is not wasted on aggregate data. What they have done is made a very interactive graphical representation of the data. The grey connecting lines indicate the flow of visitors on your site while the red curves indicate drop off.
The Site Visits Flow Report Shows How Users Navigate Your Site
While the visitor flow report does look overwhelming at first the design is intuitive and concise. The guys at Google Analytics have really tried to represent the user journey in a way that allows you to see how users interact with your site. We’ll be publishing more information on our blog soon when we’ve had a chance to review the feature in more depth. We’ve posted a quick video here on Youtube which shows most of the ways in which you can interact with the interface of the Visitor flow report:
2. Goal Flow
Initially this is the more exciting of the two – n funnel visualiser that I can apply advanced segments to (finally!) without having to use the API. Initially Google are only supporting URL goals but they plan to add events later. This is a fantastic addition because the old funnel report was very limited in the types of analysis you could do, all traffic was grouped together so you couldn’t see if ppc visitors or seo visitors were more likely to drop out of the funnel, and at which stage.
The Goal Flow Report is a vast improvement on the old funnel visualisation
What Next for the Google Analytics Flow Visualiser?
The Google Analytics blog announced there will be more flow visualisations and aspects to the report. Of course the challenge is to make the most out of these great features that are contained in the tool. I once heard Avinash Kaushik describe Google Analytics as a shiny bike which the Mountain View team keep adding pieces to. With the Flow Visualisation Report it’s starting to look more like a high performance super bike 
This article is was co-written by Adam Gutteridge
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