Google’s New Data Visualization Tool for Analytics

October 20, 2011 | By Jesse Bouman |

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising at Google, announced the latest Google Analytics tool: Flow Visualization.

Flow Visualization is going to be a great tool for a variety of different site owners. Flow Visualization can track the path users take when navigating a website. It’s visual representation of data that’s easy to digest for any user of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has always had sales funnels, to track sales conversations, but Flow Visualization takes it to another level. For instance, you can sort your visitors by browser, determine which pages they visit, and at what point they might abandon your site. You can ascertain which links users are clicking on to navigate your site and if there is an optimal path that you can take advantage of. All of this represented in a graphical, interactive map, for free.

Ms. Wojcicki started her presentation saying that Flow Visualization was inspired by an obscure spaghetti map of Napoleon’s march to and from Russia in 1812. The map visually represents the number of soldiers who died on the journey. As soon as I saw this I immediately knew the relevance of Google’s new analytics tool and was quite enthused at the possibilities.

This very spaghetti map has been framed and hanging in my family’s living room for years. It first became relevant to me when I was a senior in college and finishing my degree with a required cartography class. Little did I know that years later, in an entirely different context, it would again rise to significance in my life.

At Demeter Interactive, we love data and this paradigm shift in data technology is very exciting for us. Which is why when I first saw Susan Wojcicki share the Napoleon spaghetti map I knew how Flow Visualization would impact our company first. When we create promotions on social networking sites, like Facebook, we can directly track how many visitors are sent to our site and which social network is sending us the highest quality traffic. Flow Visualization is going to eliminate a lot of the guessing game for marketers.

Flow Visualization is going to be rolled out to users over the course of the next several weeks. I’ll be sure to let Theridion readers know our thoughts when we first get the chance to experience it first hand. Is Flow Visualization as interesting to you as it is to us or are we just die-hard data junkies?

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Posted in Fun News, Theridion Blog