How to Get The Data
It's rather easy to get important data regarding our site's complexity
from "Conversion Analyst". After
logging in, go to REPORTS, "Navigation", "Clicks to
Pages", and "By URL" or "By Title".
Click
here to see an example of a "Clicks to Pages" Report >
In the report, you'll notice 2 data columns - Number of Visits
and Average clicks. For our example, we'll want to locate the URL
of our shopping cart page, cart.asp.
We can see that for
the time period reported that the average clicks to our shopping cart page
was 8. Let's get a little more information that will help us determine
why our visitors are taking more pages to find our shopping cart.
By placing our mouse over the
magnifying glass to the left of the cart.asp line, we see that one of
the options we have is to view the "path to here". By clicking on
"Path to here", we're taken to a path analysis chart showing us
the pages that were visited prior to arriving at our shopping cart page.
Click
here to see how this looks in Conversion Analyst >
In Conversion Analyst after drilling
down, you'll see a path analysis chart similar to this
that graphically lists the pages that were visited prior to arriving at
our shopping cart page.
Now if we run this
same path analysis report for the same period 12-months ago, we'll be
able to look for any additional branches of activity between our primary
entry page and the checkout page. These added branches may be an
indication that our customers are confused or not getting all of the
information they're expecting. Also,
note how many visitors exited our site from one of those new branches of
activity.
Once you've identified the new branches, take a
look at the primary entry page and those new branches for any changes you
might have made in the content or navigation. Also consider our
visitor's expectations prior to their visit. If we're driving traffic
to this primary page from a PPC campaign, check that there is a strong
degree of continuity between our ad creative and the content on the page.
A change in our PPC ad copy could influence our visitor's navigation
behavior.
Note that depending
on the size of your site, a path analysis chart may become difficult to
manage due to the numerous possible navigation paths. So it's important
to focus on the path navigation for specific products or pages, one at a
time.
