Over the last month I have been trying out a new addition to Google Analytics called Visitor Flow. Visitor Flow provides a graphical representation of how visitors meander their way through your site. The old tools were notoriously difficult to generate any kind of meaningful insight as to how visitors navigated through our clients websites, so this has been a god send, especially when delivering reports and recommendations to clients. 

You can vary the dimensions used to generate a flow diagram, so you can start to build a picture of how people found you, what they looked at and where they got bored and literally dropped off your site. The example below shows a flow diagram using 'Traffic Source' as the first step.

The diagram is also interactive, allowing you to highlight or explore specific paths through your site showing how many visitors passed through to another page and how many you lost. This is particularly useful when trying to understand why you haven't achieved the Goals you were hoping to, or to monitor the effectiveness of a campaign landing page.

If you'd like to explore this in more depth you can click on a node an see a detailed overview of how visitors interacted with your site from a specific Source, for example Google or Bing Search, as opposed to refferals from directories or blogs.