Unravelling User Behaviour with GA4’s Path Exploration Reports

Understanding how users navigate your website is crucial for optimising user experience, improving conversions, and identifying potential areas of friction. GA4’s Path Exploration reports can help you to map out user journeys, revealing valuable insights into how users interact with your site.

What is a Path Exploration Report?

The path exploration report lets you visualise the paths your users take through your website, giving a better understanding of how people progress from one stage in the customer journey to the next. Path exploration is free-flowing and can follow any number of undefined paths, allowing you to see the most common routes. This can be particularly helpful to uncover looping behaviour, which may indicate users becoming stuck, or discover the effects of an event on users’ actions.

Benefits of Path Exploration Reports

Unlike other exploration reports like funnel exploration that only analyses a single, predefined path, path exploration allows you to discover how users actually navigate your site, which may differ from the expected path. Path exploration reports also allow you to identify popular content through seeing which pages are visited the most often. This data can be used to inform website navigation and UX changes.

How to Create a Path Exploration Report

Navigate to Explore:

Once you are in your GA4 property, go to the “Explore” section in the navigation on the left-hand side.

Select the Path Exploration Template:

Choose the “Path exploration” template from the available options. This will generate a pre-made report, you can customise this report or click “start again” to start from scratch.

Customise the Report:

Select the date range and choose the metric you wish to use.

       

Configure the Starting or Ending Point:

 You can choose to select either the starting point or the ending point in your path exploration. The starting or ending point can be any of the four node types: event name / page title and screen name / page title and screen class / page path and screen class.

Configure the Consecutive Steps:

Choose the node type for all the following steps. You will see the top five for each step.

Additional Configuration:

You can further refine your Page Exploration reports by using breakdowns, segments and filters. A breakdown allows you to see your path exploration broken down by individual dimensions such as gender, country, or device category. Segments let you analyse the paths of certain groups of users and filters can be useful to refine or narrow down your data.

You can save and share your path exploration with users in the same property. Your funnel will now be available in the “Explore” section!

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