\u201cPath Analysis\u201d is a type of analytics report that monitors the page views leading up to and following the view of a specified page.\u00a0 For instance, a path analysis of the main \u201cProducts\u201d page on a website might include the three pages leading to it and the 5 pages following it.\u00a0 The report indicates the most frequent paths.<\/p>\n
Most of the time, I find this to be quite useless, especially when looking at more than 3 pages in a path.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 The internet is a web of pages, not a pathway of pages.\u00a0 So path analysis is really just a list of the many different ways a visitor can arrive at a specified page.\u00a0 Only if you have a gazillion visitors to your site will this information eventually (if ever) become meaningful.\u00a0 Sure, there are some experiences in a website that are linear in nature \u2013 filling out a serial form, registration, checkout, etc. \u2013 but all of those experiences are carefully monitored by conversion funnels (or should be).<\/p>\n
However, there are two VERY good situations in which path analysis is not only useful but necessary.<\/p>\n
Situation #1: Anomalous Page Views<\/strong><\/p>\n When viewing your page view reports, you see that a specific page is getting an unusually high number of visitors.\u00a0 This is unexpected to you and you want to know one or both of the following:<\/p>\n Let\u2019s 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.\u00a0 In this case, you have probably used an overly-technical term in the instructions without context.\u00a0 A slight amendment to the text will provide a much greater user experience.<\/p>\n Now, let\u2019s 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 \u2013 no pun intended \u2013 these days and everyone wants your \u201cHulk Smash\u201d action figure.)\u00a0 In the path analysis you discover that the most popular pages following the blog posts are your search page and your eBay inventory page.\u00a0 It seems pretty likely that adding a link from your blog post directly to the \u201cHulk Smash\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The scenarios I\u2019ve described here may seem trivial, but imagine that you\u2019ve an e-commerce site with a million visitors a day, and you\u2019ll quickly realize that looking a small percentage of customers to unclear instructions or poor findability is a big deal.<\/p>\n Situation #2: Motivation to Register or Buy<\/strong><\/p>\n My favorite example of path analysis is much more specific case \u2013 namely registration.\u00a0 You\u2019ve probably got conversion funnels set up to track progress through the process itself, but what\u2019s terribly interesting from a path analysis point of view is WHY people are registering.\u00a0 Luckily path analysis can help to answer this question in 2 ways.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 But more exciting than that, to me anyway, is where they go immediately AFTER registering.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even if it isn\u2019t the core feature of your site or business.<\/p>\n Will your general usage and page view analytics tell you this?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 But it\u2019s unlikely to tell you what comes FIRST unless you\u2019ve set up specific reports to monitor sequences like that.\u00a0 Path analysis is extremely easy to set up and analyze for situations like this.\u00a0 It is also great if you have a service on your site \u2013 once they\u2019ve signed up for (or better yet, purchased) that service, what\u2019s the first thing your customers do with it?<\/p>\n To wrap up\u2026<\/p>\n Path analysis is generally no fun and not much help.\u00a0 Buy there are a couple of really good uses for it \u2013 you just have to recognize when it\u2019s a good time to invoke a path analysis report, and whether it\u2019s going to tell you what you need to know about a specific type of visitor behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analytics","category-web-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suddenmischief.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n