Inter-Site Pathing

Some of my clients have many websites that they track with Adobe Analytics. Normally, this is done by having a different Report Suite for each site and then a Global Report Suite that combines all data. In some of these cases, my clients are interested in seeing how often the same person, in the same visit, views more than one of their websites. In this post, I will share some ways to do this and also show an example of how you can see the converse – how often visitors view only one of the sites instead of multiple.

Multi-Site Pathing

The first step in seeing how often visitors navigate to your various properties, is to capture some sort of site ID or name in an Adobe Analytics variable. Since you want to see navigation, I would suggest using an sProp, though you can now see similar data with an eVar in Analysis Workspace Path reports. If you capture the site identifier on every hit of every site and enable Pathing, in the Global Report Suite, you will be able to see all navigation behavior. For example, here is a Next Flow report showing all site visits after viewing the “Site1” site:

Here we can see that (~42%) remained in the “Site1” site, but if they did navigate to others, it was the “Site2″or “Site3” sites. You can switch which site is your starting point at any time and also see reverse flows to see how visitors got to each site. You can also see which sites are most often Entries and Exits, all through the normal pathing reports.

Single Site Usage

Now let’s imagine that upon seeing a report like the one above, you notice that there is a high exit rate for “Site1,” meaning that most visitors are only viewing “Site1” and not other sites owned by the company. Based upon this, you decide to dig deeper and see which sites do better and worse when it comes to inter-site pathing.

The easiest place to start with this is to go to your Global Report Suite and open the Full Paths report for “site” variable in the Global Report Suite and then pick one of your sites (in this case “Site1”) where shown in red below:

This report shows you all of the paths that include your chosen site (“Site1” in this case). Next, you can add this report to a dashboard so you see a reportlet like this:

You can now do the same for each site and see which ones are “one and done” and which are leading people to other company-owned sites.  For some clients, I add a bunch of these reportlets to a single dashboard to get a bird’s eye view of what is going on with all of the sites.

Trending Data

However, the preceding reports only answer part of the question, since they only show a snapshot in time (the month of February in this case). Another thing you may want to look at is the trend of single site usage. Getting this information takes a bit more work. First, you will want to create a segment for each of your sites in which you look for Visits that view a specific site and no other sites. This can be done by using an include and exclude container in the segment builder. Here is an example in which you are isolating Visits in which “Site1” is viewed and no other sites are viewed:

One you save this segment, you can apply it to the Visits report and see a trend of single site visits for “Site1” over time, as shown here:

You will have to build a different segment for each of your sites, but you can do that easily by using the Save As feature in the segment builder.

Lastly, since all of the cool kids are using Analysis Workspace these days, you can re-use the segments you created above in Analysis Workspace and apply them to the Visits metric and then graph the trends of as many sites as you want. Below I am trending two sites and using raw numbers, but could have just as easily trended the percentages if that is more relevant and added more sites if I wanted. This allows you to visually compare the ups and downs of each sites’ single site usage in one nice view.

Summary

So to conclude, by using a site identifier, Pathing reports and Analysis Workspace, you can begin to understand how often visitors are navigating between your sites or using just one of them. The same concept can be applied to Site Sections within one site as well. To see that, you simply have to pass a Site Section value to the s.channel sProp and repeat the steps above. So if you have multiple sites that you expect visitors to view in the same session, consider trying these reports to conduct your analysis.