This article explains how to use the Goal Flow report to understand and improve the user experience of your site. Before proceeding, you might want to review the content in the Related resources section below.
Understanding what content is working well can help you improve your user engagement. In the same way that restaurants periodically update their menus to eliminate unpopular dishes and keep the ones that are selling well, you can evaluate the traffic patterns to see what content is most engaging and what content tends to be ignored or used at the exit point.
In this article:For advertisers and publishers
If you sell advertising based on traffic volume, engagement is especially important. The more users you can attract, and the longer you can keep them engaged with content that deliver ads, the more revenue you can generate.
In this case, you might not have one specific page or screen as a goal, but rather a collection of pages or screens on which you hope to see a certain level of traffic. For example, if you host news content, you might want to create separate funnels as containers for your political, sports, and entertainment areas, and then compare the relative volumes of traffic through each funnel, and the level of engagement. If your sports section is doing well during the playoffs but your political section is doing poorly during an election cycle, you might want to see whether there are layout or content approaches you employ in your sports section that are also appropriate for your political section.
For ecommerce sites
For an ecommerce web site whose goal is to sell products, time on page may be secondary to having a page effectively move a user on to the shopping cart and checkout page. You can set up funnels with the shopping cart or checkout page as the goal and with intermediate product pages as the funnel steps, and then see whether some product pages function better than others. Is there consistently higher traffic through some pages than others? Do some pages funnel traffic on to the shopping cart better than others? Is it a case of some products just being better than others, or is there a difference between the page designs that might account for the difference in traffic volume? Do the better performing pages offer more information about their products, more customer reviews, or more options for visualizing the products before adding them to the shopping cart?
