Path Analysis

For this blog, I will offer my opinions on Avinish Kaushaik’s blog post “Path Analysis: A Good use of time?” My opinions will be expressed as responses to the following questions:

Question 1: Do you agree or disagree with the post? Why?

I do agree with this post. Path Analysis can provide some good preliminary data, but I do not necessarily think the quality of data is always worth the energy and resources need to get it. One particular area of Path Analysis that is often flawed, according to Avinish, is the inability to determine which page in a series is most influential to the customers. In other words, which page can be attributed to the customer moving on or completing a desired action? The main goal of doing web page analysis is identifying what influences our customers’ decisions once they reach our website. If page analysis cannot identify which pages are most influential, then it fall short of the primary goal.

Question 2: How could your company use Path Analysis?

For this question, let’s use Amazon.com as an example. Amazon could use this technique in evaluating Digital Marketing Landing Page (DM) or their Checkout pages. Page Analysis could be effective in these types of situations because there is no navigation required on the part of the consumers. These scenarios are typically structured so customers can just keep clicking “Next.” Analyzing a structured Path vs. one that has a customer bouncing around, eliminates the need to account for typical browsing patterns of jumping from page to page in a non-linear path.

Question 3: What advantages or dis advantages would Path Analysis provide?

One advantage of Path analysis is the ability now, for tools like Click Tracks, to group pages with related content into categories. This eliminates linearity and allows a company to use data from customers jumping from page to page out of sequence. Another advantage is it highlights how different segments of the analysis are influenced by various content. Being able determine which percentages of visitors arrived via a search engine (i.e., Google) vs. the overall number can show a company how effective their SEO is.

One disadvantage of Path Analysis is it is difficult to depict and determine the paths customers typically use. According to Avinish, less than 5% of visitors follow the most common path. If only a small group of visitors are utilizing the common path, it is difficult to make effective decisions for the majority. Another disadvantage is the number of paths visitors could take could be overwhelming…depending on the number of possible pages. With a large number of possible combinations, it would be time consuming and inefficient to examine all the possible patterns for a minimal amount of useful data.

Reference: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/path-analysis-a-good-use-of-time/.