Navigating the unexpected deadends and misleading turns of a poorly organized website is never fun. Your website must provide visitors with what they expect to find, whether that’s content, products, or whatever means to whatever end.
And yet, I continue to see websites that seem to be designed to keep users ensnared in an annoying virtual corn maze, complete with dead ends and false trails. One way to make sure your users don’t want to come back to your website is to frustrate them. (Unless that’s the point of your site.)
The fixes are usually fairly simple to employ once you can identify the sticking points. To do so, you must know how to interpret Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data for informed insights.
This article explores how you can use GA4’s path exploration report to help remove website roadblocks for your users.
1. How are new visitors from a specific channel navigating my website paths in a specific browser?
If you’re directing too many people down the same, wrong paths, you will have some unhappy and claustrophobic visitors.
Let’s walk through the steps in GA4 to see how visitors navigate your site and how you can see the ways different segments of people navigate (or fail to navigate) your twists and turns.
- Sign in to Google Analytics.
- On the left, click Explore.
- At the top of the screen, select the Path exploration template.
- To try to help you see what’s possible, Analytics will automatically fill the template with a sample implementation. Click Start Over in the upper right to clear the sample.
- Drag and drop the Event button from Node Type to the Starting Point.
- At this point, a menu will pop up for you to select what Event you want to dive into. Since we’re focused on first-timers, we will select the default Event, first_visit.
- The report will automatically populate step 1 with the same node type; in this case, the Event. But we’re interested in seeing where first-timers go on our site, so click the drop-down under Step +1 that says Event Name, and select Page title and screen name.
- Now, we can see what pages on our site first-time visitors land on. I’m willing to bet your homepage is pretty high up there, so click that page title to open up Step +2 (a.k.a., what page first-time users to your homepage navigate to).
- Measure your feelings. No, really. Are you surprised by what you see? Did you expect first-time visitors to your homepage to make it to a specific product or pricing page that isn’t even in the top five listed in “Step +2?”
- To see specifically Organic Search users subset, we will apply a Segment. Go to the Segments menu under Variables and click the plus (+) icon.
GA4 has a ton of pre-built segments for you to peruse at your leisure, but we will select Templates and then Acquisition.
- From there, those without RegEx experience can collectively release the breath you’ve been holding because now we can select the First user default channel and add a filter that contains a drop-down of default channels. Then click the big blue Save and Apply button in the top right corner.
To see our segment broken down by Browser (or analyzed by any other attribute), follow the last three steps, only this time select the Dimensions variable.