Funnel Analysis Hack: View Next Page Path in Google Analytics
See how to view where people are clicking to from any page with this quick trick. See how to unlock your own insights!
Brad Redding
Brad Redding is the Founder & CEO of Elevar. Specializing in analytics, tracking, GTM, and conversion optimization.
Have you ever wanted to know where people are going/clicking to from a particular page (like your home page)? Or how about these examples:
- What blog pages are driving the most traffic to your shopping pages?
- What pages are people going to after landing on the homepage?
- What products are people going to at the end of a product quiz?
Well this is where the next page path dimension in Google Analytics should help you. However they deprecated (i.e. stopped supporting) this metric several years ago so it’s useless! It is actually the same data as your page path dimension now.
So you’ll resort to having to use the Behavior Flow report in GA, right?
My eyes hurt just thinking about having to use that! For some reason my brain can’t comprehend this report. I’ve tried…a lot. I just can’t make sense of it when there is a decent amount of data.
How to View Next Page Path in Google Analytics
This is easier than you’d expect and only requires a creative report!
This example will demonstrate the blog referral to shopping page example – i.e. how many people are you driving to shopping pages from your blog pages?
Step 1: Go to Google Analytics > Customization > Custom Reports > Create New Report
Step 2: Set page & previous page path as dimensions and pageviews as metric
Step 3: Set your report filters to include the previous page path of blog AND exclude the page of blog*
* you’ll need to change this to your own blog URL
Step 4: Save report and analyze your new insights!
That’s it. Once you save your report then you’ll see a list of pages in the first column that were the next page a user visited from the page listed in the 2nd column (which was the previous page path).
Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you in the comments below.
Related Articles:
- Google Analytics Custom Metrics for eCommerce Insights
- eCommerce Feature Analysis with Google Analytics
- Customize Promotional Banners by Campaign
That’s a smart idea, Brad! I just created the report and it’s helping.
I feel ya on not wanting to look at the Behavior Flow report for everything. 🙂
Thank you, Sunni!
Hi thanks for your tip!
I was googling for funnel analysis and ended up here.
I have a further question regarding this.
If I want to create a funnel analysis report that involves multiple pages in GA, how am I supposed to set this up in GA?
I want to see users browsing behavior in the following steps:
1. Homepage: User lands on the homepage
2. Special Promo Page: User browses to a special promotion page
3. Product Display page: User clicks on a button which lead to the product detail page in special promotion page
4. Check out page: User clicks on check out button in product page then lands in check out page
5. Order completion page
As described above, this involves 5 pages and I’m not sure if I can create a report using your explanation above. I’m not a GA expert so it could be due to lack of my knowledge. Would you be able to help?
Thank you in advance!
Hi Randy – thank you for the comment! You can do this by creating a “Destination” Goal (under View settings) and then enable the funnel setting which allows you to add steps 1-4 as your funnel steps (step 5 would be your final goal URL). Let me know if that helps out!
First it wouldn’t work for me, but then I noticed I had both set to “include”. Changed the appropriate to “exclude” and viola!, works like a charm.
Thank you!
Would this work historically or only from the date you created the “Destination” Goal?
The report you posted is great, thanks!
Hi Claire – for the page path reports they will work historically. When setting up a destination goal the goal will only report successfully after it’s created. Hope that helps!
Hello Brad!
Thank you for this amazing tip 🙂
There’s something that’s bugging me though. By excluding the Blog as Page, this prevents you from seeing how many Blog posts were also Previoust Page, right?
I get that it’s excludes the refreshes and similar but then, it also excludes the move from similar URLs path.
Am I right? Is there a way around?
Cheers!
I believe there might of been a mistake. I’m seeing expected results when I tweak the last filter from “regex” to “exact”.
Thanks for such an easy to read blog! I feel this is the report I need but just needs a bit of tweakin. Im looking for the exact number of clicks from page x to page y. Is this the best report?
Nice. One note, I think you cannot use the metric pageviews here since you are using sessions level dimensions (previous page path) here. You metrics should be on session oruser level.
This was MOST HELPFUL! Thank you so much – very clear and concise.
(Hi Brad,
Thank you so much for the tip. I have a small question, is there any way to download in excel any flow (Behaviour Flow) path from GA. I would like to know the full path of all the users that visit a group pf page (magazine inside a e-commerce web) and know what they did before and after visits the magazine.
Thank you soooo much
Hi! Please help! Do you know how I can look at the two previous pages, instead of just one? Or two subsequent pages, instead of just one, in GA or Google Data Studio? Thank you
how can I look next page instead of previous?
Hello, constantly i used to check weblog posts here in the early hours in the daylight, as i like
to find out more and more.
Everything is very open with a really clear explanation of
the issues. It was definitely informative. Your website
is very useful. Many thanks for sharing!
Great information.