How do we track the user flow in a website that doesn't have an authentication system?

Question

Let's say the customer filled a form on the 3rd page he visited, how do we find out his flow.(Where did he come from, which links on the website he clicked, basically the entire flow till he filled in the form).

There is no login or any kind of authentication system on the website. Is there a way to monitor the user flow? I don't have much experience with google analytics. Can anyone help me with this?

Answer 1

There are two options to do this:

1) User Reports

See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_OiIyLC4cI - From @Ramankingdom comment

Go to Google Analytics > Audience > User explorer. Create a custom segment for your form of interest (in terms of the event data), e.g. Advance Conditions > Filter Sessions to Include > Event Category Contains Forms > Event Action Contains My Form of Interest

The resulting window will show you each Client ID, the number of sessions each client has had, session duration.. etc, as well as goal conversion rate. Note that this is the overall goal conversion rate, and is not specific to a specified goal.

You can then explore the clients behavior across sessions and within session, and have a list of specific interactions that Google Analytics captured.

2) Custom Reports

The second option is to export all behavior using your Client, Session and Timestamp custom dimensions. For this you will need to create a custom report for the Three custom dimensions along with Page Path.

Once you have exported the page path data, you will need to repeat for events (as they need to be queried separately).

Once you have the exported data, you can then join your datasets and have a full csv output of each of your sessions. This then gives you the ability to review the process data of any session containing any interaction of interest.

This method is more complicated, but will provide you with more flexability in the long run.

Limitations: This will be constrained to the data that has been sent to GA. I.e if links are not tracked, you will not be able to determine every link the user clicked.

--- Update ---

If you want to understand the flow of a particular user, specific to an email enquiry or lead, then you will also need to capture a unique identifier. For example, you could have a hidden field with a randomly generated number. This randomly generated number would then be sent along with the email. In addition, this randomly generated number should be captured with the email enquiry event, allowing you to identify specific email enquiries, whilst abiding by the PII terms of GA.

Answer 2

You need to start using google analytics and google tag manager

You can generate cutom report related to user flow ,device ,location etc.

The Users Flow report is a graphical representation of the paths users took through your site, from the source, through the various pages, and where along their paths they exited your site. The Users Flow report lets you compare volumes of traffic from different sources, examine traffic patterns through your site, and troubleshoot the efficacy of your site.

• https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1709395?hl=en

• https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/user-flow-google-analytics/

you can find more details here

Go to analytics

find the page you want stats on where visitors went next. To do that, you need to click on that page and select "Explore traffic through here", which ultimately leads to another flow visualisation, but only includes traffic going to and from that page:

You an also define your custom events and get all information related to user.