Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 7 – Determining Visitor Behavior Patterns

Acting on Results

Monitoring and Adapting to Patterns

When you have identified patterns your visitors follow, you will want to make changes to your site to improve it for the user experience or to capitalize on aspects of visitors behavior. We have already identified several of these in the previous sections:

• Use the Referred From report to find out which referrers are sending visitors to pages with long view times or to exit pages
• Use the Referring Domains by Step report to find referrers that send visitors with more steps through the site.
• Analyze the content of long- and short-view pages and entry and exit points to see if they are indicative of problems.
• Install a click tracking script to see where visitors leave to.

However, remember that the design and analysis process is iterative. When you make changes, visitors will change their behavior and you have to keep on top of the reports and continue to analyze every time you make a change.

It is often tempting to come to conclusions about visitor patterns and make a lot of changes to the site at once. Not only can this confuse your users, but it will make it hard to determine which changes correlated with which results. A better approach is to make small changes one at a time and see how visitors react to the change. By using a controlled environment, where only one element of design, marketing or content is changed at a time you can test your customer response much more effectively and correlate specific actions to particular elements in your site.

Deeper Investigation

When you are looking at visitor behavior patterns there are two features of Summary that can make the investigative process much easier. First, many reports include drill-down support. If you click on the item in a row, Summary will give you a report of related data. For example, in the Referring Domains report you can click on a domain link and see a report of referring pages within that domain.

Secondly, many of Summary’s reports include a search box. Instead of browsing through all the entries in the report, you can just type in a pattern in the search box and Summary will limit the report to matching items. This is especially useful when looking for specific patterns in large reports or when looking up items from one report in another. For example, if you have identified key entry pages from the Entry Point report, you can use the search box in the Referred From report to find the referrers pointing to each page.