The Analycise™ Approach - An Example

The Analycise™ approach combines the best of both the standard 'pages visited' type site usage reports and the more complicated 'customer path' analyses. Combining these two approaches provides you with a detailed understanding of how users work your site and it's resources. And, it gives you the insights needed to refine your site architecture and structure.

Let's look at some usage data for the Analycise.com web site to help you understand the Analycise™ methodology better.

The Standard 'Pages Visited' Analysis

Average Number of Pages Visited

Analysis of traffic logs showed that for one short period, 19 site visitors generated 39 different page views on the Analycise.com site. The detailed breakdown of pages visited was:

Page Visited	Page Visits
index.htm	24
id2.htm	9
id6.htm	6

In other words, each user visited slightly more than 2 pages on average.

Entry Page Analysis

Analysis of entry pages showed:

Entry Page	Entry Visits
index.htm	19

In other words, everybody started their use of the site with the default index page.

Exit Page Analysis

A similar analysis of exit pages shows a bit different pattern:

Exit Page	Exits
index.htm	16
id2.htm	1
id6.htm	2

The most frequent exit page was the default index page, but a few users did end their sessions after visiting other pages.

What This Doesn't Tell You

What these standard tabulations can't provide are answers to some important questions, like:

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Why did I see the index page visited more times than I had visitors?

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How did visitors move from page to page?

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What will I need support additional visitors?

Customer Path Analysis

The purpose of the customer path analysis is to determine how users move from page to page within a web site. Many log files contain the key data needed for this type of analysis - even if they are in a simplified form. The key task is to isolate and identify each user's progress through the site.

By analyzing the addresses, time stamps, referring URL, and request fields in the log files, some of the customer behavior we were able to identify included:

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29% of the time visitors chose to go to page id2.htm from the index.htm page

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33% of the time visitors on both the id2.htm page and the id6.htm page returned to the index.htm page

•

33% of the time visitors on the id6.htm page returned to the id2.htm page

•

56% of the time visitors on the id2.htm page moved to the id6.htm page

The power of this data is that it is possible to use some advanced matrix mathematics tools to take these 'transition probabilities' and create a model that shows how users will work your site.

Combined Approach - From the Analycise™ Methodology

The table below shows the results of our analysis of customer behavior for the Analycise.com site.

Starting Page	index.htm Visits	id2.htm Visits	id6.htm Visits	Total Page Visits
index.htm (Home)	1.263158	0.473684	0.315789	2.052632
id2.htm (About Us)	0.803828	1.528708	0.882775	3.215311
id6.htm (Contact Us)	0.688995	0.667464	1.399522	2.755981

This table shows that visitors starting at the standard entry point, the index.htm (Home Page) will average seeing about 2.1 pages per visit. Visitors starting at the id2.htm (About Us Page) would look at about 3.2 pages per visit - a much higher resource use level. And, finally, users starting at the id6.htm (Contact Us Page) would visit about 2.8 pages per visit.

Design Implications

The implied design strategy here would be to insure that people always start at the Home Page. But, this is sometimes harder to accomplish in practice than it might seem. Many users bookmark pages on the interior of a web site. These results indicate that users of the Analycise.com site should be discouraged from such interior bookmarks. Or, the site should be programmed such that all external referrers should be sent directly to the home page.