Avinash Kaushik talks about the problems with Path Analysis which repeats what was said in Tradtional Web Analytics is Dead Podcast and Avinash and the 10,000 foot Analytics view. Listen in. Web Analytics is dead - Part II ; there's also a link in my original posts to the podcast which I listened to three times (because it was very good).
Avinash's post illustrates what he talked about in the podcast - I wanted him to go further and put in some new material, and he did:
Here is example of new way of thinking about “Path Analysis” that I think is heading in the right direction. (Please see Disclaimers - Disclosures first.) There are atleast three more things I would like to see fixed in this version but ClickTracks address some of the usual fatal flaws here.
It is possible to break down a linear process into one in which we can group a bunch of related pages (say all product pages) into “groups”. This helps fix the problem of linearity because customers can go from A to B to C or C to A to B and it does not matter for related content.
- It is possible for Visitors to show up in any stage at any point (this is actual behavior now with SEO influencing where people land). Google Analytics also has this feature(please correct me if others do as well).
- Perhaps the cutest thing is that it shows which page in the “Path” is most influential in moving people to the next stage. This is awesome because one can simply look at the “darker shaded” pages and know, for example, that no one cares about system requirements but rather the page on our 10 year no questions asked return policy is the most important one in convincing people to add to cart.
- It is also quite easy to view how different segments are influenced by different content, in my unreadable screen shot you can see All Visitors vs Visitors from Google. Imagine this intelligence then turned around and applied to personalization (!).
This is not perfect but getting there and I think all the vendors will soon coalesce around this innovation and we will all be greatly empowered.
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