Path analysis (computing)

Last updated

Path analysis, is the analysis of a path, which is a portrayal of a chain of consecutive events that a given user or cohort performs during a set period of time while using a website, online game, or eCommerce platform. As a subset of behavioral analytics, path analysis is a way to understand user behavior in order to gain actionable insights into the data. Path analysis provides a visual portrayal of every event a user or cohort performs as part of a path during a set period of time.

Contents

While it is possible to track a user's path through the site, and even show that path as a visual representation, the real question is how to gain these actionable insights. If path analysis simply outputs a "pretty" [1] graph, while it may look nice, it does not provide anything concrete to act upon.

Examples

In order to get the most out of path analysis the first step would be to determine what needs to be analyzed and what are the goals of the analysis. A company might be trying to figure out why their site is running slow, are certain types of users interested in certain pages or products, or if their user interface is set up in a logical way.

Now that the goal has been set there are a few ways of performing the analysis. If a large percentage of a certain cohort, people between the ages of 18 and 25, logs into an online game, creates a profile and then spends the next 10 minutes wandering around the menu page, then it may be that the user interface is not logical. By seeing this group of users following the path that they did a developer will be able to analyze the data and realize that after creating a profile, the “play game” button does not appear. Thus, path analysis was able to provide actionable data for the company to act on and fix an error.

In eCommerce, path analysis can help customize a shopping experience to each user. By looking at what products other customers in a certain cohort looked at before buying one, a company can suggest “items you may also like” to the next customer and increase the chances of them making a purchase. Also, path analysis can help solve performance issues on a platform. For example, a company looks at a path and realizes that their site freezes up after a certain combinations of events. By analyzing the path and the progression of events that led to the error, the company can pinpoint the error and fix it.

Evolution

Historically path analysis fell under the broad category of website analytics, and related only to the analysis of paths through websites. Path analysis in website analytics is a process of determining a sequence of pages visited in a visitor session prior to some desired event, such as the visitor purchasing an item or requesting a newsletter. The precise order of pages visited may or may not be important and may or may not be specified. In practice, this analysis is done in aggregate, ranking the paths (sequences of pages) visited prior to the desired event, by descending frequency of use. The idea is to determine what features of the website encourage the desired result. "Fallout analysis," a subset of path analysis, looks at "black holes" on the site, or paths that lead to a dead end most frequently, paths or features that confuse or lose potential customers.

With the advent of big data along with web-based applications, online games, and eCommerce platforms, path analysis has come to include much more than just web path analysis. Understanding how users move through an app, game, or other web platform are all part of modern-day path analysis.

Understanding visitors

In the real world when you visit a shop the shelves and products are not placed in a random order. The shop owner carefully analyzes the visitors and path they walk through the shop, especially when they are selecting or buying products. Next the shop owner will reorder the shelves and products to optimize sales by putting everything in the most logical order for the visitors. In a supermarket this will typically result in the wine shelf next to a variety of cookies, chips, nuts, etc. Simply because people drink wine and eat nuts with it.

In most web sites there is a same logic that can be applied. Visitors who have questions about a product will go to the product information or support section of a web site. From there they make a logical step to the frequently asked questions page if they have a specific question. A web site owner also wants to analyze visitor behavior. For example, if a web site offers products for sale, the owner wants to convert as many visitors to a completed purchase. If there is a sign-up form with multiple pages, web site owners want to guide visitors to the final sign-up page.

Path analysis answers typical questions like:
Where do most visitors go after they enter my home page?
Is there a strong visitor relation between product A and product B on my web site?.
Questions that can't be answered by page hits and unique visitors statistics.

Funnels and goals

Google Analytics provides a path function with funnels and goals. A predetermined path of web site pages is specified and every visitor walking the path is a goal. This approach is very helpful when analyzing how many visitors reach a certain destination page, called an end point analysis. [2]

Using maps

The paths visitors walk in a web site can lead to an endless number of unique paths. As a result, there is no point in analyzing each path, but to look for the strongest paths. These strongest paths are typically shown in a graphical map or in text like: Page A --> Page B --> Page D --> Exit. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers. Advancements in data collection methods, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics, have enabled marketers to deploy more effective real-time and prolonged customer experience personalization tactics.

Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It can be valuable in areas rich with recorded information; analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming, and operations research to quantify performance.

Cohort analysis is a kind of behavioral analytics that breaks the data in a data set into related groups before analysis. These groups, or cohorts, usually share common characteristics or experiences within a defined time-span. Cohort analysis allows a company to "see patterns clearly across the life-cycle of a customer, rather than slicing across all customers blindly without accounting for the natural cycle that a customer undergoes." By seeing these patterns of time, a company can adapt and tailor its service to those specific cohorts. While cohort analysis is sometimes associated with a cohort study, they are different and should not be viewed as one and the same. Cohort analysis is specifically the analysis of cohorts in regards to big data and business analytics, while in cohort study, data is broken down into similar groups.

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, or create user behavior profiles. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends, which is useful for market research.

In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page", "single property page", "static page", "squeeze page" or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are used for lead generation. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser's conversion rate. A landing page may be part of a microsite or a single page within an organization's main web site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Analytics</span> Web analytics service from Google

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also the mobile app traffic & events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.

In marketing, geomarketing is a discipline that uses geolocation in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities. It can be used in any aspect of the marketing mix — the product, price, promotion, or place. Market segments can also correlate with location, and this can be useful in targeted marketing.

A click path or clickstream is the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site, presented in the order viewed. A visitor's click path may start within the website or at a separate third party website, often a search engine results page, and it continues as a sequence of successive webpages visited by the user. Click paths take call data and can match it to ad sources, keywords, and/or referring domains, in order to capture data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Targeted advertising</span> Form of advertising

Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle and interest. This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent online activities. The process of algorithm targeting eliminates waste.

Customer feedback management (CFM) online services are web applications that allow businesses to manage user suggestions and complaints in a structured fashion. A 2011 study conducted by Aberdeen Group showed that companies using customer feedback management services and social media monitoring have a 15% better customer retention rate.

Session replay is the ability to replay a visitor's journey on a web site or within a mobile application or web application. Replay can include the user's view, user input, and logs of network events or console logs. Session replay is supposed to help improve customer experience and help identify obstacles in conversion processes on websites. However, it can also be used to study a website's usability, customer behavior, and the handling of customer service questions as the customer journey, with all interactions, can be replayed. Some organizations also use this capability to analyse fraudulent behavior on websites.

Netnography, is a specific type of qualitative social media research. It adapts the methods of ethnography, is understanding social interaction in contemporary digital communications contexts. You can think of netnography as a particular set of actions for doing research within and about social media. Netnography is a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation. In netnography, a significant amount of the data originates in and manifests through the digital traces of naturally occurring public conversations recorded by contemporary communications networks. Netnography uses these conversations as data. It is an interpretive research method that adapts the traditional, in-person participant observation techniques of anthropology to the study of interactions and experiences manifesting through digital communications.

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors’ activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.

In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions—that is, site visitors who are paying customers.

Behavioral analytics is a recent advancement in business analytics that reveals new insights into the behavior of consumers on eCommerce platforms, online games, web and mobile applications, and Internet of Things (IoT). The rapid increase in the volume of raw event data generated by the digital world enables methods that go beyond demographics and other traditional metrics that tell us what kind of people took what actions in the past. Behavioral analysis focuses on understanding how consumers act and why, enabling predictions about how they are likely to act in the future. It enables marketers to make the right offers to consumer segments at the right time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Funnel analysis</span>

Funnel analysis involves mapping and analyzing a series of events that lead towards a defined goal, like an advertisement-to-purchase journey in online advertising, or the flow that starts with user engagement in a mobile app and ends in a sale on an eCommerce platform. Funnel analyses "are an effective way to calculate conversion rates on specific user behaviors". This can be in the form of a sale, registration, or other intended action from an audience.

User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs and motivations through interviews, surveys, usability evaluations and other forms of feedback methodologies. It is used to understand how people interact with products and evaluate whether design solutions meet their needs. This field of research aims at improving the user experience (UX) of products, services, or processes by incorporating experimental and observational research methods to guide the design, development, and refinement of a product. User research is used to improve a multitude of products like websites, mobile phones, medical devices, banking, government services and many more. It is an iterative process that can be used at anytime during product development and is a core part of user-centered design.

Social media mining is the process of obtaining big data from user-generated content on social media sites and mobile apps in order to extract actionable patterns, form conclusions about users, and act upon the information, often for the purpose of advertising to users or conducting research. The term is an analogy to the resource extraction process of mining for rare minerals. Resource extraction mining requires mining companies to shift through vast quantities of raw ore to find the precious minerals; likewise, social media mining requires human data analysts and automated software programs to shift through massive amounts of raw social media data in order to discern patterns and trends relating to social media usage, online behaviours, sharing of content, connections between individuals, online buying behaviour, and more. These patterns and trends are of interest to companies, governments and not-for-profit organizations, as these organizations can use these patterns and trends to design their strategies or introduce new programs, new products, processes or services.

Data-driven marketing is a process used by marketers to gain insights and identify trends about consumers and how they behave — what they buy, the effectiveness of ads, and how they browse. Modern solutions rely on big data strategies and collect information about consumer interactions and engagements to generate predictions about future behaviors. This kind of analysis involves understanding the data that is already present, the data that can be acquired, and how to organize, analyze, and apply that data to better marketing efforts. The intended goal is generally to enhance and personalize the customer experience. The market research allows for a comprehensive study of preferences.

Click tracking is when user click behavior or user navigational behavior is collected in order to derive insights and fingerprint users. Click behavior is commonly tracked using server logs which encompass click paths and clicked URLs. This log is often presented in a standard format including information like the hostname, date, and username. However, as technology develops, new software allows for in depth analysis of user click behavior using hypervideo tools. Given that the internet can be considered a risky environment, research strives to understand why users click certain links and not others. Research has also been conducted to explore the user experience of privacy with making user personal identification information individually anonymized and improving how data collection consent forms are written and structured.

References

  1. Thayer, Shelby. "Why Do We Care About Path Analysis?". Trending Upward. Archived from the original on 2016-03-17. Retrieved 2022-12-27.
  2. "Analysis Tools". Google Analytics.
  3. Sales Funnel

Further reading