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Path Analysis
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Figure 5. The Paths by Source report can
illuminate unexpected visit patterns. |
Between the entry and exit points visitors will often view many other pages on
your site. Web analytics can collect the entire path each visitor takes to allow
you to understand how visitors use your site (which may be surprisingly
different than you had intended in the design.) For example, you might be very
interested in where users go next after they look at their basket in your online
store. Do they check out? Leave the site? Return to browse or search for more
items? Summary provides the Paths by Source
report, Figure 5, to help you find out where users are going after
they get to a specific page. Conversely, you may have a particular page on your
site that is important and want to know how visitors get there. Summary’s
Paths by Destination report tells you just
that.
Using the Visit Paths report, you may be
able to see common paths followed by visitors to your site. For small sites, the
Visit Path report will often contain one or two very common paths with the rest
being insignificant. On large sites, you will notice that there are generally so
many routes to so many destinations that none of them stand out in particular.
In this case you can use filters and subreports, which we will cover in Lesson 8 - Examining Subsets of Traffic, to look at a
portion of the traffic and analyze paths of those visitors.
One-Page Visits
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Figure 6. The One Page Visits report lists
pages that comprised an entire visit. |
Some visitors will only see a single page. They enter at a point and exit from
the same page. If you are delivering content in individual pages to your
visitors, then this might be a good thing. Your users will be happy to find the
content they need in one step and will remember to use your site in the
future. On the other hand, if you are dependent on maintaining visitors’
attention, this could be indicative of problems in design, content or search
engine listings. The One Page Visits report,
Figure 6, highlights which pages on your site were the entirety of a visit for
one or more visitors. Several of Summary’s reports also include a column
of ‘1 Page Visits’ that you can click to see which requests have the
highest number of one-page visits and analyze the content of those to see if
they are indicative of problems.
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Long View Durations