Path Breakdowns and Breakdown Trends
In my last post, I shared how you could build segments from website paths using the flow visualization in Analysis Workspace. This was done by right-clicking on a specific path and choosing the “segment” option. In this post, I’d like to share another cool thing you can do by right-clicking within flow visualization paths – path breakdowns. Once you have created a flow report, you can pick a specific flow branch and right-click to see a host of options. In this case, we will use the “breakdown” option that is directly below the “segment” option we used in the last post as shown here:
Once you select the breakdown option, it acts like any other breakdown such that you choose if you want to breakdown the path by dimension, metric, segment or time as shown here:
To illustrate this functionality, I will breakdown the path flow of people going from the home page to my blog index page by the type of device they are using as shown here:
This will produce a table that shows the device type breakdown for the specific flow:
This table shows me that most people are viewing this flow from non-mobile devices. Keep in mind that I could have broken down this flow by any dimension, segment, etc. depending upon the business question I was trying to answer.
From here, I might want to see how this particular flow breakdown is trending over time. Is the percentage of desktop vs. mobile phone vs. tablet pretty consistent or does it vary over time? I can view this by visualizing the data in the newly created table by right-clicking again and choosing a chart type:
In this case, I chose the stacked area chart which shows me my path flow by device type trended by month…
Summary
If you have specific path flows that you want to dig deeper into, using path flow breakdowns is an easy way to see how path flows differ by dimension or segment. And if you want to see the path flow breakdowns over time, you can add visualizations to the resulting data…
