| |
Lesson 7 –
Determining Visitor Behavior Patterns |
|
|
Entry and Exit Points
Visitors arrive at your site at a given page, usually from a link on another
site. They then travel through the site and, at some point, generally follow a
link off the site. Even if they are not following links, the start- and
end-pages of each visit can be especially interesting because they emphasize
what the visitors were looking for and what they found (or did not find.)
|
| Figure 3. The Entry Point report tells
you visitors’ first impressions. |
Entry Pages
The Entry Point report in Figure 3 gives you
the top pages (or other non-graphic requests) that visitors first saw when they
came to your site. Knowing where users are entering your site can help you
understand what their first impression is. Many times you will find that your home
page is not the most common entry point as you may have thought. Using
the % of Enters column you will usually see that a few of your pages comprise
the majority of entry points. By selecting these top pages, you can make sure
that important business agendas (such as your online store) are presented to
users when they first find your site.
|
|
Sometimes entry points, especially when picked up by search engines, will be
indicative of what users are trying to find on your site. If users seem to be
coming in at the wrong place, you might want to consider reorganizing your site
or work on improving your search engine listings to better represent the
information your site is meant to convey. Search Engines were covered in more
detail in Lesson 3.
As mentioned in the previous section, the Referred From
report can help you determine where users are finding your entry
pages. Take the first few pages from your entry report and look them up in the
Referred From report to find which top referrers are sending traffic to them. By
capitalizing on these referrers, you can focus your traffic even more.
|
| Figure 4. The Exit Point report may
tell what visitors were looking for. |
Exit Pages
|
|
|
In Lesson 5 - Revenue Modeling we discussed analyzing
exit pages to look for sources of lost revenue: Did the visitor leave because he
was lost, confused or uninterested, rather than continuing to the purchase page?
The Exit Point report, Figure 4, can also be
used to understand the visitors’ goals. The majority of exit pages are probably
indicative of the destination of the visitor; what she was looking for. If you
can identify certain exit pages that are obvious end-points to a search, then
you might want to make navigation to those pages more prominent to help visitors
find them, particularly if you have high-ranking exit pages that do not show in
the top of the Entry Points report.
If you have downloads on your site, then you will almost certainly want these
to rank high in the Exit Point report. You want your visitors to find them
because, presumably, they are the reason you built your web site or they are
your major source of income.
Link Following
|
|
|
When a visitor clicks on a link on your site that takes him to another site,
you will not get any record of it in your log files. The request is sent from the
visitor’s browser to the next server directly. So while you may know what page
he exists from, you have do not know where he is going. There is a way to work
around this. In Lesson 4 - Advertising we discussed
how to track clickthroughs on advertisements by installing a redirector script.
This is exactly the same as capturing exit page destinations. You need to
install a redirector script and then inspect the CGI report to see what pages
users went to.
As mentioned previously, Randal Schwartz has written an
article and script on click tracking for WebTechniques magazine. If you use
Randal’s script then your CGI Arguments report
will contain entries like ‘/cgi-bin/go/http://www.x-network.com/’
where ‘http://www.x-network.com’ is the site the visitor was going
to. By adding a CGI parameter to the script link, like
“source=index.html”, the CGI Arguments report will list each exit
page under the listing of the destination with hits for every pair.
|
|
|
|
Long View Durations