In my previous post I blogged about differences between Adobe Analytics (Omniture Site Catalyst) and Google Analytics Premium. Please go to below link if you want to get more info about these tools.https://www.webanalyticspower.com/2013/01/google-analytics-premium-versus-adobe.html
In this post I want to go into more detail about path analytics. I have this client with many pages and complicated transactions on their site but they happen to use Google Analytics . When I needed to do the path analysis on the site my only way was to set up funnel visualization which was not retrospective. It meant I had to wait sometime to collect certain amount of data. Then of course I can only have certain amount of them, I can’t keep setting up funnel visualization reports as much as I can.This frustrated me a lot. Can you imagine all the paths that can occur on a big site? How 25 goals can be enough for this job?
Path analytics will show you how your visitors navigating on your site or on your mobile apps.
You might want to see what kind of paths are happening on your site..
You might want to look at certain path that is interest to you.
When I say path I just don’t mean page flow, I mean everything..
What people searched? Links they clicked?
Let’s say 100 people searched for sport shoes, then 60 of them searched for running shoes and maybe 30 of them searched for hiking shoes in one visit.
Of course I also want to see where people go if they back out on something on my site.But I want to see their whole journey, not just one page before or after.
If you use Omniture and of course if you tagged your pages properly with s.pagename , then you can see it all. You can see FULL PATHS, you can filter these paths with the pages you want, you can create FALLOUT (similar to funnel visualization) and you will see historical data too.
With this feature I would know how people navigate on my site which is such a useful information for product managers, interaction designers and user experience professionals.
I can also segment this path data. For instance your path data will be always different if you compare one traffic source to another. Then you will understand what kind of people you acquire with your marketing channels.
All good stuff.
With this in mind, I promise to write something good about Google Analytics next
cheers and loves
sibel akcekaya
