• Convincing: http://xkcd.com/833/

Go to xkcd.com, click “Random” a lot – trust me, you’ll be a happier person.

Most of the time, I find this to be quite useless, especially when looking at more than 3 pages in a path.  Why?  The internet is a web of pages, not a pathway of pages.  So path analysis is really just a list of the many different ways a visitor can arrive at a specified page.  Only if you have a gazillion visitors to your site will this information eventually (if ever) become meaningful.  Sure, there are some experiences in a website that are linear in nature – filling out a serial form, registration, checkout, etc. – but all of those experiences are carefully monitored by conversion funnels (or should be).

However, there are two VERY good situations in which path analysis is not only useful but necessary.

Situation #1: Anomalous Page Views

When viewing your page view reports, you see that a specific page is getting an unusually high number of visitors.  This is unexpected to you and you want to know one or both of the following:

1. What brought these visitors to the page?
2. Where did the information on this page lead them?

Let’s suppose that the popular page in question is a help page defining a technical term and the number one page leading to it is a set of instructions for performing some worthwhile task.  In this case, you have probably used an overly-technical term in the instructions without context.  A slight amendment to the text will provide a much greater user experience.

Now, let’s suppose that the popular page in question is a blog post about your amazing collection of Incredible Hulk figurines (it turns out that the big green guy is all the rage – no pun intended – these days and everyone wants your “Hulk Smash” action figure.)  In the path analysis you discover that the most popular pages following the blog posts are your search page and your eBay inventory page.  It seems pretty likely that adding a link from your blog post directly to the “Hulk Smash” posting on eBay would be the best way to provide a better user experience for the visitors AND ratchet up the auction price on your collectibles.

The scenarios I’ve described here may seem trivial, but imagine that you’ve an e-commerce site with a million visitors a day, and you’ll quickly realize that looking a small percentage of customers to unclear instructions or poor findability is a big deal.

Situation #2: Motivation to Register or Buy

My favorite example of path analysis is much more specific case – namely registration.  You’ve probably got conversion funnels set up to track progress through the process itself, but what’s terribly interesting from a path analysis point of view is WHY people are registering.  Luckily path analysis can help to answer this question in 2 ways.

First, the pages visited prior to registration may tell you what features of your site are most interesting to a visitor that makes them want to register.  But more exciting than that, to me anyway, is where they go immediately AFTER registering.  If people complete the registration process and then make a b-line for a specific feature, you should make sure that said feature is promoted like crazy in the non-gated parts of your site.  Even if it isn’t the core feature of your site or business.

Will your general usage and page view analytics tell you this?  Maybe.  But it’s unlikely to tell you what comes FIRST unless you’ve set up specific reports to monitor sequences like that.  Path analysis is extremely easy to set up and analyze for situations like this.  It is also great if you have a service on your site – once they’ve signed up for (or better yet, purchased) that service, what’s the first thing your customers do with it?

To wrap up…

Path analysis is generally no fun and not much help.  Buy there are a couple of really good uses for it – you just have to recognize when it’s a good time to invoke a path analysis report, and whether it’s going to tell you what you need to know about a specific type of visitor behavior.

Yesterday, Mr. Costner appeared with his team from Ocean Therapy Solutions (OTS) before the U.S. Congress about their solution to the Gulf Coast oil spill. Apparently, long ago, when he was just a young half-human half-fish saving his friends from the maniacal Dennis Hopper (captain of the gigantic rowboat, Exxon Valdez) he developed bond with the ocean and a yearning desire to help keep it clean. 15 years and $20 million of his own money later, here’s his big chance.

The device that OTS has come up with in this 15 year quest is, basically, just a centrifuge. Take any oil and water mixture and spin it around for a while (or hard enough) and the denser oil will move to the outside and the thinner water will collect on the inside. Voila! We’ve been using this method to separate substances for a couple hundred years but, as they say, the devil is in the details. How do you get the stuff in? Do you work in small batches or is there a way to make the process continuous? How do you get the stuff out? And, of course, with all the salt in that pesky ocean, how do you keep the machinery from rusting before lunchtime?

OTS appears to have come up with answers to most (if not all) of these and other problems. I don’t know what they are (…yet), but they have demonstrated their technology and it appears to work. While the industry was content to tout the latest innovations in floating barriers, chemical dispersants, and fancy helicopters, OTS has produced something that may actually help with the problem.

Admittedly, the pump that OTS has designed is meant to be a first-response device. Catch it while the spill is small, and the darling device should have no real trouble sucking out the oil. Neither Mr. Costner not his teammates know whether their pumps will be effective at helping to clean up the gazillion gallons of oil in the Gulf – it’s a LOT bigger than they probably ever imagined. But with the efforts of both BP and the Feds not seeming to make much headway, America is ready to see some good news.

The U.S. Congress, citing a trillion and a half in deficits, won’t be standing on queue to purchase these devices. I don’t think they needed to justify it that way. If oil companies had these devices lying around as oil spill insurance, the government could contract the oil companies to clean up messes that get out of hand – why own the equipment when you can lease it? And BP has ordered 32 of them and hopes to drive them around in small boats and try to clean up about 6 million gallons of this mess per day.

If that just means keeping pace with the spill itself, I think it’s a big win…one America would like to have seen a few weeks ago. And if the technology proves itself on this battlefield, I don’t think oil companies will be able to afford not having such devices in their oops-correction stockpile. We may yet see the end of disastrous oil spills.

And what of Kevin Costner? His love of the ocean, and subsequent investment and nurturing of technology to clean it, may very well have rescued it in dramatic fashion.

Save the ocean, save the world!

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(Just don’t make him run too long…he gets tired!)

Talk to you next time.