Web Visitor Trails aka Path Analysis
Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor says that path analysis of website visitors is not a good use of time. I know that in the past, I felt it was an extremely important indicator of a website visitor’s experience. That is, understanding which sequence of webpages each visitor visited.
Now, however, I feel that it’s only useful for particular types of websites: those with well-defined navigation paths on your site, and can “guide” visitors to where you want them to go.
For example, say you have several tutorials, each consisting of a sequence pages, and containing a bare minimum of navigation. Because of this, you are “channeling” your visitors to complete the tutorial. It’s worth it to know whether visitors actually are completing the tutorials. If they are not, there’s probably something wrong.
Another example is a checkout path, if you have an e-commerce website. Are visitors completing checkout? This is in fact the exception scenario for path analysis that Avinash discusses. He says that web pages with a structured experience are worth doing path analysis for. For anything else, there are far too many path page combinations - possibly thousands. And for some sites, it’s just not worth it. (Just my opinion, but I think that weblog style websites fall into this “not worth it” category.)
