Analysing Your Website's Click Paths

Part of the Small Business IT For Dummies Cheat Sheet (Australian Edition)

Path Analysis allows you to see how visitors are moving through your website, which pages they enter and exit by and which are the most common pathways through your site. Some things to look for when performing path analysis:

Do a lot of your visitors arrive on your home page and then not go any further?
Do most visitors enter your site via the home page but instead arrive on a specific product or service page?

Being able to monitor whether visitors are finding the pages you want them to or taking the actions you want them to take, such as subscribing to a newsletter or purchasing a product is very useful.

For example, perhaps you’re launching a new product and have placed ads on other websites or on Google AdWords. Hopefully, you’re directing people straight to the page about this new product and not to your home page. Then, to judge the effectiveness of your copy and online advertising, measuring how many people are entering your website via this new page is important.