Interactive path analysis of web site traffic
Pavel Berkhin, Jonathan D. Beche, Dee Jay Randall · 2001
The goal of Path Analysis is to understand visitors' navigation of a Web site. The fundamental analysis component is a path. A path is a finite sequence of elements, typically representing URLs or groups of URLs. A full path is an abstraction of a visit or a session, which can contain attributes described below. Subpaths represent interesting subsequences of the full paths.Path Analysis provides user-configurable extraction, filtering, preprocessing, noise reduction, descriptive statistics and detailed analysis of three basic specific objects: elements, (sub)paths, and couples of elements. In each case, lists of frequent objects --- subject to particular filtering and sorting --- are available. We call the corresponding interactive tools Element, Path, and Couple Analyzers.We also allow in-depth exploration of individual elements, paths, and couples: Element Explorer investigates composition and convergence of traffic through an element and allows conditioning based on the number of preceding/succeeding steps. Path Explorer visualizes in and out flows of a path and attrition rate along the path. Couple Explorer presents distinct paths connecting couple elements, along with measures of their association and some additional statistics.