Thursday, December 03, 2009
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From my experience visitor profiles and click-paths (also called navigation paths or click streams) are probably the most under rated metrics available to web masters today and to make matters worse the fact that most analytics providers do not log this data means that many web masters aren't aware they can make use of it.
Visitor profiles and click paths are essentially the process of recording each and every step a visitor takes on their visit through your web based estate, including the event or page url logged, the time spent on that event and the exact order in which it all happened (or is happening). On top of the click path data we can also see key information about the real person that is interacting with your site including in what city and country are they are located, the method in which they found your site including any keywords used, the language and browser information, operating system and even screen resolution.
This was one of the key principles behind the development of Degaa, to deliver a clear view of actual site activity and user interaction in real-time and the tools allowing you to take direct actions to improve not only visitor experience but our users' bottom line!
When a visitor is more than just a numberBringing all this information together in one view of your websites activity really brings the site to life and gives its owner invaluable insight into how real people are interacting with it and allow them to make informed decisions and where there is room for improvement.
Imagine if you could see that a new visitor to your site from the US found you after searching Google for 'rose growing tips', landing on your beautifully researched article on the subject, and then after reading your words for a good 10 minutes he ventures over to your garden tools section in search of some of the tools you recommended to him in. After spending another 12 minutes selecting the perfect set of pruning shears and gloves, places them in his shopping basket and heads on over to the checkout section only to abandon their purchase after reading your returns policy. With just a single look at this visitors click stream you can instantly see that you need to take a good hard look at your returns policy so see how this visitor might have been converted into profit.
It's not only e-commerce orientated sites that benefit from this type of analysis, the goal of any website is to keep their visitors engaged during their visit and encourage them to explorer other areas. Take a news website for example, using using click-path data we could locate areas in which navigational improvements to news categories and link placement can double or triple visitor page views and overall visit length.
This kind of information can our web master vital insight into how visitors are finding their site, with what keywords, where they are from, and most importantly what they are actually doing when they get there, instantly changing what were hard to interpret totals and averages into real, actionable tools of improving your conversion rates.
But why wait for it?The world doesn't stand still, right now people are interacting with your website, viewing your content and deciding weather or not they want to do business with you. We need to be the ability to bring all of this information together and see it happening now, in real-time, just as those people are reading your content.
With Degaa we can watch, as its happening, visitors finding our sites, accessing their landing page, following internal links and see exactly at what stage they decided to make a purchase, sign up for the news letter, download the latest catalogue or disappear into the ether never to be seen again.
Introducing Click-path SegmentationTo take that one step further, With Degaa from each of the reports we can view all of the individual visitors and click paths that have been logged. We can for example see on the Top Search Terms report that there were 8 visits today for the key phrase 'Spanish culture and customs', we can then drill down into the actual visitors to see where they are from, how they found us, how long they spent on the site and of course most importantly what did they do while on the site.
With these mechanisms in our ever growing arsenal we can actively concentrate on specific groups of visitors and pin point not only what we are doing well but more importantly how where are not meeting their needs and desires!
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