Providing delightful customer experiences with relevant, contextual, targeted and personalized content has become the differentiator today as brands try to outdo each other for acquiring, retaining and delighting their customers. Sitecore Path Analyzer is a revolutionary and powerful tool that is helping brands to analyze the behavior of visitors and the path they take during their digital customer journey. Path Analyzer shows where customers first entered the website and what different path configuration they followed during their journey within your website.

Every visit and interaction with Sitecore backed website is captured in Sitecore's Experience Database (xDB). The data so gathered allows Sitecore users to drive contextual insights about the user behaviors, attitudes and browsing patterns to help businesses and marketers better engage with their customers with contextual communication and content. Sitecore, thus, by default captures every customer interaction in the xDB as the customer travels across your site and continues or snaps their journey with you. A well-designed website built through a Sitecore platform generates specific user behaviors in terms of predefined goals and outcomes, channels, campaigns and valuable results indicating a successful visit.

How Does Sitecore Path Analyzer work?

Path Analyzer basically generates a map that displays the sequence of paths taken by customers or contacts when they journey through your website. The map shows all the paths your contacts take as they interact with your assets, campaigns or when they trigger a particular goals and outcomes.

You can also create new Path Analyzer maps to analyze and keep track of user experiences on your websites as your contacts visit your site and interact with your digital assets. Sitecore Path Analyzer allows you to create new maps for tracking users by segmenting them either as first-time users or returning customers, giving you an insight into how different customers depending on their relationship with you behave on your websites.

Another advantage of Path Analyzer is that it displays and segments paths depending on the volume of traffic, on engagement values, on engagement values per visit or efficiency. It thus helps you track paths with highest traffic or engagement values giving you an in depth insight into what works, which strategy is more efficient and how you can orchestrate your content for higher engagement, customer retention and better optimization.

The Page Analyzer

Page analyzer brings in the more micro version of maps (paths travelled) pertaining to a particular page in your site in contrast to the entire website on the larger scale. Page Analyzer can be leveraged to know a more detailed and zoomed in view of the paths traversed by your users to and from the specific pages on your website. Page Analyzer can be accessed from page node and opening Page Analyzer.

With Page Analyzer you can explore different paths that lead to a particular page and view individual contacts that had their specific experience with that particular path.

Thus, with Path Analyzer you can have both the macro path views with all the high-level path maps as well as the micro page level path views down to an individual contact with that specific path experience. From there, you can move to and reach her or his Experience profile.

Analyze and Recalibrate to What Works

Path Analyzer gives the ability to recalibrate your website, your campaigns and strategies in the direction that works. It shows you exactly as to which page in your website is driving the results as users tend to trigger specific goals and outcomes. It also lets you know the exact paths your contacts followed before arriving at your desired business goals and help you find out the paths that are not as effective. Path Analyzer thus basically offers you with a map that helps you locate your contact’s journey (footprints) and their experiences across your website. In addition to that, it also lets you create your own maps to identify traffic from a particular channel or campaign.

After creating your maps, you can use them to oversee:

Information about the paths with the help of specific reports such as the number of contacts who have visited a particular path, their engagement values and the average values that each path generated per visit.

You can make use of the Metrics tab to get an in-depth understanding of how that particular path performed, whereas the Contacts tab helps you analyze your contacts in terms of the specific path they have traversed, the goals and outcomes they have triggered in the process and the location where they actually came from.

You can make use of Funnels to keep track of your contacts from their very entry to your website from an external channel, to their journey with you on your website, their interaction, to their exit or their final conversion to a particular goal or outcomes. This will help you to implement personalization and A/B testing for increasing the percentage of visitors that reach your desired goals.

Path Analyzer Comes with out of the box maps that you can use:

• Goals and Outcomes Map: for analyzing all the paths and journeys that reached the desired outcome
• Campaigns Map: for tracking every contact that is part of a specific campaign
• Channels Map: for tracking visitors via a specific channel
• Assets: for analyzing such journeys that culminated into downloading of your intended assets
• Site Specific Maps: These are site specific maps provided to you if you have multiple sites being tracked
  
  

Sitecore Path Analyser report though is helping brands to analyze the behavior of visitors and the path they take during their digital customer journey and helps them track what works and where there is higher engagement, but our experiences have shown us that customers overlook the Path Analyzer report. To understand how these reports can help you engage our customers more with you and recalibrate campaigns that work, you can get in touch with us and derive value out of these reports.

Espire is a Sitecore global partner with multiple Sitecore projects delivered for global locations and clients across multiple industry verticals. We are enabling digital transformation & personalization by crafting awe-inspiring Customer Experiences. Get in touch with our experts for a quick demo and to learn how you can leverage Sitecore platform for creating impressive customer experiences, faster time to market and boosted business returns in the new normal.