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Learn how to use Google Analytics to derive common user behaviour

Introduction

In addition to finding out how many simultaneous users you need for a load test (for more information you can refer to http://loadimpact.com/blog/search?criteria=analytics), you might also find it challenging to choose visitor behaviors that are representative of all your site visitors. There are many permutations of behaviors possible and it is not practical to simulate everyone of them. We can, however, make use of analytics software to find common user behavior. This guide explains how Google Analytics helps you do the job.

Extracting the data

On the right menu of Google Analytics, select Content -> Top Landing Pages.

Choose an appropriate date range. In this example, we have chosen two months worth of data. Wider date ranges produce more accurate user behaviors, but will not be able to tell you the latest common behavior. To avoid ending up with irrelevant user behaviors, be careful not to choose a start date before any major revisions of your website.

You should now be able to see this  on the right hand side of the page. Click the second option to have the data displayed in pie chart form.

Let’s focus on the two most popular landing pages, “/” and “/index.php”. Visitor paths will be represented by nodes. We will dive into the concept in more detail in a later analysis, but let’s complete the whole diagram first. 

Next, under “Overview”, click “Entrance Paths”.

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Here you will see the various paths of different content.  “Then viewed these pages” shows what was viewed and the corresponding percentages after your visitors went to the selected content. “And ended up here” shows what content was viewed after that. 

Let’s take a look on the paths taken by visitors after arriving at the http://loadimpact.com/ page. We will ignore the first two results as there is an auto loading script in the index page (this can be accounted for by increasing sleep time later on). Hence, other probable content that our visitors will go to are “/products.php?light” and “/products.php?basic pages”. We will add this information to the diagram:

We click “/products.php?light=” and look under “And ended up here:”. Again, we find the two most visited pages and plot them in the diagram together with corresponding precentages of users that came from the previous page.

For the branch starting with “/index.php”, we get the following:

The above diagram shows the paths commonly taken by visitors starting from loadimpact.com/index.php. 

We could go on for a few more iterations, but for this example we will stop here. Next, go to “Top Exit Pages” and verify that the top two exit contents appeared in your last iteration.

In this case they did appear and we can safely say that three iterations are sufficient to give an accurate picture of visitor behaviors.

Analysis

In every branch, we multiply the percentages together to obtain a “comparison number”. For example, starting from /index.php to /pageanalyzer.php to / yields 0.064*0.0403*0.0221 = 0.000057.

We do that for every branch and then rank the sequence of content from highest to lowest “comparison number”.

Hence, the most common user behavior would be to go to our index page, and from there click “Sign up now” under “Load Test Light”, and then return to the index page before leaving the website. This is illustrated in the top diagram below.

The other common behavior would be to go to our index page (Note that http://loadimpact.com/ and http://loadimpact.com/index.php point to the same page with the same codes), and then subsequently click “Sign up now” followed by “Proceed to registration” on the products page.

Once common user behaviors are determined, we can proceed to transform it into a load script via the session recorder (available through purchase of any Load Impact Premium account).

It should be noted that this method is only valid for a general load test on your website. You might also want to test specific functionality, in which case this method is not very useful.