Pathing Analysis [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

For most Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst cus­tomers, Pathing Analy­sis is some­thing with which they are pretty famil­iar.  After all, one of the pri­mary rea­sons to use a web ana­lyt­ics pack­age is to be able to see how site vis­i­tors are tra­vers­ing the pages of your site.  There­fore, in this post, I will cover the basics of Pathing Analy­sis, but then out­line some more advanced uses of pathing that you may not be famil­iar with.

What is Pathing?
Tra­di­tional Pathing Analy­sis con­sists of view­ing flow reports which show you how often site vis­i­tors go from Page A to Page B or Page C on your site.  By sim­ply hav­ing Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst code on your site pages, you will be able to see sev­eral dif­fer­ent pathing reports right out of the box.  Pathing is com­monly used to ana­lyze key web­site process flows in hopes of iden­ti­fy­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment.  For exam­ple, you may notice that an unusu­ally high num­ber of site vis­its show pathing exits after view­ing the “Shop­ping Cart” page.  After you have sev­eral months worth of data, you should be able to base­line your stan­dard pathing exit rates and then make changes to key pages and see if these changes have a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive effect.

There are eigh­teen pathing reports avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst, but there are a few that I tend to use the most:

Next Page Flow
This report allows you to see two lev­els of pathing from the selected page so you can visu­ally see where vis­i­tors are going from the selected page.  The thick­ness of the bars is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the percentages.

Fall­out Report
The fall­out report allows you to add sev­eral pages to a can­vas and see how often vis­i­tors view­ing the first page in the can­vas viewed the sec­ond page and how often those view­ing the sec­ond page viewed the third, etc…  It is impor­tant to under­stand that the vis­i­tors do not need to have viewed the pages in the exact order indi­cated on the can­vas, but rather, need to have viewed them in the spec­i­fied order to be included in the fall­out report.  While you can only add a finite num­ber of pages to a fall­out report in Site­Cat­a­lyst, you can add many more to the can­vas if you use Omni­ture Dis­cover.

Pathfinder Report
The pathfinder report allows you to add pages to a canvas, but also pro­vides the abil­ity to add wild cards and choose whether you would like to include entries and/or exits in your analy­sis.  This pathing tool is com­monly used for under­stand­ing all of the dif­fer­ent ways vis­i­tors can get from Page A to Page Z on your site.

Impor­tant Things to Know About Pathing
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about Pathing:

1. Pathing can be enabled on any Traf­fic Vari­able, not just Page Name.  The most com­mon uses of Pathing are Page Name and Site Sec­tions (s.channel), but there are many cre­ative uses for Pathing beyond this.  For exam­ple, if you want to have an easy way to see the order that site vis­i­tors view your prod­ucts, you can pass the prod­uct name or ID# to a Traf­fic Vari­able on each prod­uct page and then enable pathing to see which prod­ucts are viewed concurrently.
2. Pathing reports only con­sider that a path has changed when a new value is passed to the Traf­fic Vari­able.  This is impor­tant, because, if you acci­den­tally use the same page name for two dif­fer­ent pages, you will not be able to see instances where vis­i­tors went from one page to the other.
3. Pathing reports do not span mul­ti­ple visits.
4. In Site­Cat­a­lyst, you can­not com­bine sev­eral pages into a bucket and view pathing to/from the bucket of pages, but you can do this in Omni­ture Dis­cover.
5. Pathing reports are not avail­able in Omni­ture DataWare­house or the Excel­Client.  In future posts I will dis­cuss how you can use ASI (Advanced Seg­ment Insight) to see paths for a sub­set of your audience.
6. You can­not view pathing on a Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of a Traf­fic Vari­able (sProp) in Site­Cat­a­lyst (though you can in Dis­cover).  There­fore, you should take this into account when deter­min­ing whether to cap­ture data val­ues directly into a vari­able or a Classification.
7. Pathing reports can­not span across mul­ti­ple Site­Cat­a­lyst report suites so if you want to see pathing for dif­fer­ent sites, you need to have a com­mon tag on pages of both sites (known as multi-suite tagging).

Real-World Exam­ple
In this install­ment of our real-world exam­ple, let’s say that one of Greco Inc.‘s sub­sidiaries is a Finance related media site and its goal is to increase Page Views so it can increase paid adver­tis­ing rev­enue.  As part of its Site­Cat­a­lyst imple­men­ta­tion, Greco Inc. captures the ticker sym­bols vis­i­tors search upon in a Traf­fic Vari­able.  It turns out that peo­ple are will­ing to pay top dol­lar for Paid Dis­play Ads served up on the “Apple” ticker sym­bol (AAPL) results page.  Unfor­tu­nately, many of the other ticker sym­bol search results pages don’t com­mand such a pre­mium.  There­fore, Greco Inc. would like to find a way to iden­tify more “Apples” on its site so it can increase over­all adver­tis­ing rev­enues.  To do this, they decide to enable pathing on the Traf­fic Vari­able con­tain­ing the ticker sym­bols being searched upon.  This allows them to see which ticker sym­bols are being searched directly before and after (shown below) “AAPL.”

Armed with this infor­ma­tion, Greco Inc. can make a case to its clients that it can pro­vide an almost iden­ti­cal audi­ence as those search­ing for “Apple” at com­men­su­rate price.  From a usage stand­point, the best part is that the Ticker Sym­bol Traf­fic Vari­able does not con­tain all of the site pages, which makes it much eas­ier to fol­low and pro­vides only the data that is needed.

 

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Is there some­thing on your web­site that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best prac­tices you want to share?  If so, please leave a com­ment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@​omniture.​com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so every­one can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or com­pany name!).  If you are on Twit­ter, you can fol­low me at http://​twit​ter​.com/​O​m​n​i​_​man.

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