User Journeys and Path Analyzer: Symposium Session Follow Up

We ran a really wonderful and unique session yesterday at Sitecore Symposium 2020 where the team at the Australian federal government's Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources allowed us to do a live demo of Path Analyzer using their business.gov.au site.

The session allowed us to dive into how to use Path Analyzer effectively and some tips and tricks for getting the most out of custom maps.

We had a live Q&A session at the end of the demo, however we ran out of time before we could get to all of the amazing questions we received. I’ve answered those questions to the best of my ability below – and will also include the answers to the questions from the live Q&A for anyone who wasn’t able to attend.

If these spur even more questions for you, feel free to drop a comment below or send me a message. As my team and customers will attest – I’m happy to discuss the many wonders of Path Analyzer with anyone who will listen!

Follow up questions (aka those I didn’t get to or had to look into a bit further)

1.????Well, this is great for a single website in a Sitecore instance. How to avoid getting lost in a multisite environment?

Great question! You can create Site specific map groups if you have a multisite instance, which will allow you to view the data / maps for only that site. We have a few customers doing this already and it’s fairly simple to set up.

Begin by creating a new site map group under the Site Maps node.

The name you give this group will need to match the analytics property for the site you want. You can find the correct naming of your desired property in Experience Analytics in the site dropdown in the top right hand corner.

Your new group will auto-populate with a number of out of the box map groups, such as Page Maps, Goal Maps, etc.

Each of these will be set to reflect the site property you named your group for, as will each new map you create within any of these folders.

You can view / edit the property for each map group folder (i.e. Page Maps) in Content > Scope.

Ta-da! Site specific maps.

2.????Is it possible to see how A/B tests influence paths??

Unfortunately, not really at this time. But it’s a great thought and one that I will be suggesting to the Sitecore Product team for further investigation.

3.????Are maps constrained to Sitecore, or can you extend the mapping capability out to other applications and sites that are part of a user's journey, but are not hosted on Sitecore...and then report on the entire journey in Path Analyzer...?

Unfortunately, maps are indeed confined to Sitecore journeys. How great (but possibly creepy?) would it be if we could track someone everywhere they went before and after they came to us!

The closest you’ll get in Path Analyzer are channel maps or campaign maps where you can filter data by journeys that began from a specific channel or campaign you’ve set up in the Marketing Control Panel. However, these won’t include any detailed information from a 3rd party site or application, just the information we can collect in Sitecore.

4.????Can you feed third-party analytics into Path Analyzer?

Similarly to the last question, the answer for this one is no, not really.

However, if you do have integrations that are two-way and you have added data from a 3rd party source to xDB – you could potentially use those additional data points in a custom page map with a contact specific rule.

There are numerous contact rules in the PA rule set editor so you could potentially use something like “where the contact's job title compares to specific value” or “where the contact's birthdate is between date and date” even if that data was brought in from another source.

5.????If there are nodes where the names aren't descriptive as to what the page is, is there a way to find out what the url or id of it is?

This was a great question that I immediately went to investigate a bit further. Luckily if you see a node in a map that you’re not sure of, PA allows you to easily find the URL in the item info.

Simply click on the node until the information box appears and click over to the ‘item info’ pane to see the URL and the content tree path.

Pro tip: you can also use this on an experience map to differentiate between a goal and a page by looking at the template field.

Additionally, you can launch page analyzer for more detailed info about that specific page.

Questions answered during live Q&A:

1.????Do you need to set up an Engagement Value Scale before Path Analyzer shows meaningful data?

As I said during our session, you can have maps without an engagement value scale or goals but meaningful data really does rely on these.

The value and value per visit of pages and paths are a key element in most maps and without goals with value you’ll be missing a large part of PA’s appeal. Even if you don’t have a wide range of transactional goals on your site, having an EVS with a few key goals – ideally a range of both high and low value goals – will make a big difference.

2.????How do I create custom maps?

This is one of those questions that I would have loved to dive into more in the demo if I’d had more time. However, I knew it would come up so I’ve written a LinkedIn article about three of my most used custom maps and how to create them: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/creating-custom-path-analyzer-maps-sitecore-megan-engard/

You can also see the Sitecore documentation for further info on custom maps here: https://doc.sitecore.com/users/91/sitecore-experience-platform/en/create-and-configure-a-new-path-analyzer-map.html

3.????If I create a custom Path Analyzer map, does it only record from the time I create it?

Nope! One of the great things about Path Analyzer maps is that they pull historical data as long as it is stored in Sitecore already (in Experience Analytics or xDB).

4.????Do you have recommendations for getting started in Path Analyzer: where to start, what to look at, etc?

Creating a few key custom maps is where I would recommend most Sitecore users begin. The out of the box all visits map can be overwhelming as a starting point so deciding what is important to your organisation and creating a custom map to answer a specific question is a great way to dip your toes in.

For example, if your organisation runs a lot of campaigns and is already tracking them in Sitecore, creating a custom campaign map will allow you to get a deeper understanding of how people are travelling the site after coming from said campaign. Alternatively, if your organisation has a key goal that they want visitors to complete, creating a reverse goal map might be the best place for you to begin.

5.????After setting up a new custom map, how long does it typically take before you start seeing journeys?

Maps should begin populating in 3-6 hours but depending how much historical data is available, it could take up to 48 hours to fully deploy. I usually set them up and check back in 24-48 hours later as a general rule.

6.????What has been the most useful part of Path Analyzer for business.gov.au?

I believe Tijana said that for DISER, reverse goal maps have been especially useful in understanding how their visitors are interacting with key goals and where they can optimise the journeys surrounding them (I would agree that this has been a key part of our engagement lately!).

7.????I have created specific campaign activities for each channel for our campaign. I'd like to view the path of all visitors for any of those campaigns. How can I create a map for not one but many campaigns?

A great question that I actually helped a customer set up recently. Campaign maps as a map type in PA allow for one campaign to be focused in on. So, to view more than one campaign I would set up a page map and use the rule set editor to include multiple campaign rules combined with ‘or where’. See below for an example:?

8.????Do you have any tips for tackling the requisite Marketing Control Panel data to enable this type of reporting?

The key things I would start with in MCP are goals, campaigns and a profiling strategy – depending of course on what is most important for your organisational objectives. As mentioned above, goals are fairly key to deriving value even if they are limited and campaign or pattern maps can help hone in on specific groups of visitors / customers.

9.????If the leftmost, highest traffic page has the maximum number of goal completions, why is it red (low value).

This was a question related to a specific part of the demo where a node in a reverse goal map was the most trafficked page leading to the goal completion – however it was displayed as a large, red circle.

Here's a similar looking node from our demo site:

This question is great because it highlights the difference between page value and value per visit. In the example from the live demo, the page in question was part of a very short journey in which users only visited two pages before completing a goal that led them off to a third party site. Because the value per visit was low – most visitors only completed one goal in the visit – the colour of the node was red. However, the large size of the circle showed that the page or node itself was high value.

10.?What is your process for applying goals and profiling to new content?

This is a question that isn’t easy to answer in any succinct manner but fortunately the SBOS team and Sitecore in general have plenty of resources on it. Head to https://www.sitecore.com/sbos for heaps of great whitepapers, resources, etc on this topic.

11.?Question for Tijana - how did you apply value to goals when your conversions are on other sites?

The great thing about goals in Sitecore is that they are completely flexible to your organisation. In DISERs instance, driving informed leads to third party sites where they would ultimately complete an action (such as registering for an ABN) was a key objective. So while clicking the ‘register your ABN’ button on the business.gov.au site doesn’t represent a fully realised conversion in the commerce sense – we only really know that they’ve intended to do so, not that they have successfully registered – for DISER that click represents a key goal and it has a mid-high range value associated accordingly.

This is why calibrating your EVS to your company objectives is so important and goal values should be strategic decisions.

12.?Do you think Path Analyzer is best suited for a particular kind of customer journey or site? What kind of customers have you used this with?

I don’t think any one customer is best suited for Path Analyser – we have customers who have lots of content and limited goals who get heaps of value from the tool as well as customers with limited content, but very clear goals and key campaigns they want to understand?who use Path Analyzer as a key part of their optimisation practice.

As long as you have the elements mentioned previously such as an EVS with clear goals and rich data in Analytics related to the campaigns or patterns you are interested in exploring – I’m confident you’ll get use out of PA.

13.?Do you recommend creating both regular and reverse goal maps for the same goal? Can you do that simply by duplicating the first map and then just checking reverse for the second one?

My preference is the reverse goal map, but for customers I generally create both a regular goal map and a reverse goal for every key goal they want to look at. It only takes a few minutes and allows you to determine which view is giving you the most insight / which you prefer to work with.