Mapping a visitor journey

[#1]

Hi all,

I'm looking for the best way to map a visitor journey through a site. I am currently testing out the Flow report in Workspace, and the Next Page report.

My main issue is that I am looking at a page with 133 links available on the page, yet the Next Page report gives me roughly 707 URLs as second step, and the Flow report gives me 732 URLs in the second step.

First question is: How is this possible?

Second question is: Could you recommend the best tool/report/visualization to properly track the visitor journey?

The first analysis I have to do is where people went from the page among those 133 links.

This should evolve however and track their journey towards a target URL. This could be limited to the top 5 journeys, so in my mind I was planning to create 5 different flows and play around with them to see how people are reaching the specific page. I am very much open to suggestions!

Thank you in advance,

Floriana

[#2 · Accepted solution]

How is it possible?

The 'next page' is a record of the next page view recorded, which is not limited to the pages directly linked to from the page.  For example, a user might use their browser 'back' button to return to another page on your site which would trigger another page view and therefore be recorded as the 'next page'

Best tool?

I really like the 'site analysis' tool in Ad Hoc Analysis.  This is a fantastic tool for looking at paths between 2 points on the site and is the one capability that Analysis Workspace is really missing.

Workflow:

• create a visit level Sequential Segment - "Page you are interested it" then "target Page"
• apply this new segment to a ranked 'pages' report to find out what the top pages involved in this journey are
  • Hint: the top 2 pages will be the "Page you are interested it" and the "target Page"
• Configure a new "site analysis" report:
  • apply the sequential segment you created earlier
  • take the top X number of pages from the ranked report and add them to the 'site analysis' report (in place of the default pages)
• This should show you the most typical routes to move from "Page you are interested it" to the "target Page"

Note: I tend to find the 3D appearance of the site analysis report unnecessary.  I prefer to configure the view into a top down 2D view to make things simpler to analyse.

Hope this helps,

Andrew

[#3]

This may seem like a bit more work but what is you were to create internal tracking IDs for the 133 links on that page?

Then you could do a site wide report show top link accessed(by ID) and then even correlate the top five IDs to see all pages they each accessed. Now you can then event associate events to the IDs get a more robust view of what users are doing outside of flows.

If you then do a flow report make a segment where visit contains ID(s) and then see more specific user journeys associated with 13 links