The Sequence Segment: You're New Desired Path Best Friend

One of the key steps in the creative process when designing a website is to think of the different desired paths you want users to go through in order to convert. Sure you can get expensive journey analytics tools, but that isn't practical or cheap. Google's out of box reporting: the navigation summary report is very limiting and the behavior flow report can look a bit clunky. So what's an analyst like you to do? 

Our Story Problem

Let's look at an example involving an online retailer that just designed a new site. They'd like users to first land on their homepage, learn about their business and products, go to a categories page to choose specific products, then get to a product detail page and buy. The trick is that they are realistic in that they know that people do their research. They want to know if their users are doing this across multiple sessions to buy, not just one session. If they know this then they know the journey they want users to take is working.

About the Sequence Segment

This segment selection allows you to look at sessions or users that traverse a specific set of pages in a sequence - the perfect pathing analysis tool when you need to see how important a page actually is. Below is a screenshot of the setup (using Google's Demo account): 

Here is what is important: 

1) The sequence is set to users so it crosses sessions

2) The sequence start is set to first user interaction - this is important because the key to the business question is how they want users to first land on their home page, thus the first interaction

3) The steps are set to "is followed by" after home because it's less important to know that this page was immediately after the home page, but it is important they saw that page after the home page some point

4) After the category page is an "immediately followed by" step. The reason here is that users need to make that natural progression from the category to a specific product so we know that this progression is happening. We don't want users to go elsewhere from category

5) The unique purchase step is set to greater or equal to 1 only to see how many people bought something in this process

Here is why this is awesome:

You see the results of your sequence quickly.

Also, what is even better is that as you build this segment, you see how big the user base is, and how much drop-off you have throughout each step.

Conclusion

Sequence segments are a powerful tool in Google Analytics for you, the analyst, to be able to test the impact of your website desired paths. As you build your segment out, you can see the drop off in each step of the way. What's better worth the time is to review this sequence by reviewing through sessions, as well as users.