Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Understanding Path Analysis
path analysis allows you to identify the most popular paths your visitors pursue
through your website, mapped out in a hierarchical tree structure. You can expand
the branches of this tree to follow your visitors through as many levels of navigation
as you wish. i left out Yahoo! Web analytics' path analysis features in our discussion
of navigational reporting in chapter 8, “Using Basic Reports as templates for custom-
ization,” because they deserve a section of their own.
Yahoo! provides the following path analysis reports out of the box:
p
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ath analysis by URL
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p
ath analysis by title
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p
ath analysis by Document group
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p
ath analysis During visit 1-4
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p
aths for conversion
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p
aths for conversion by title
250
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p
aths for conversion by Document group
in addition to these standalone reports, you can use path analysis as a drill-
down feature on other reports—in fact, it makes a lot more sense to use the feature
that way.
Standalone Path Analysis Reports
Figure 10.1 shows a sample path analysis by title report. the report you see here has
been shrunk to fit the page, so you cannot read the text, but you can see the general
tree structure. next to each “branch” of the tree is an arrow. to navigate further into
the visitor path, click on the arrow next to the display.
i know it is almost evident how the feature works, but indulge me for a second,
so we can agree on the basics before we discuss how to use it, customize it, filter it, and
finally criticize it.
the standard path analysis by title report shown in Figure 10.1 is a tree from
all entries, which means that your home page is not the only starting point taken
into account. i do not recommend using all entries as a starting point to analyze
visitor navigational behavior because it gives you too much data from which to make
generalizations.
You can choose to have your path analysis reporting displayed based on two
distinct criteria:
s
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how site entries only (visit paths for the visits that started on this page)
s
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how all transit traffic (visit paths for the visits that included this page)
neither option is better than the other; it just depends on what data you want to see
and what you plan to do with the data.
