Social Flow Visualization in Google Analytics

Melanie Wahl - May 4, 2012

The Social Visitors Flow report in Google Analytics, located under Standard Reporting > Traffic Sources > Social > Social Visitors Flow, allows users to obtain a deeper understanding of their website visitors who arrived through social sources. You can assign a date range, compare a date range to the past, select a segment, or increase or decrease the number of connections between steps in the flow. The more connections, the longer the social flow report will take to load, but the more information you can see visually.

If you click on one of the boxes or nodes in the flow, three options appear. The first option, “highlight traffic through here,” allows you to highlight all traffic that originated from a specific social source or passes through a specific page (depending on which node you click on and select it from) and grey-out all other nodes and pathways.

The following is an example of a highlighted path of traffic that originated from the social source: Blogger.

The other two options, “View only this segment” and “Group details,” allow you to further customize the social flow visualization report to see the data that is most helpful to you. The first will delete all nodes not related to the selected node (a cleaner view than the highlight/graying solution under “Highlight traffic through here”) and the second brings up an option box where you can view the data (displayed visually in the flow) in table form.