Path Length Reporting: What, When, and How?

What is a Path Length?

For any business, customers are the key driving parameter that drives the business. That is why every decision or strategy taken by any business must always be focused solely on keeping the customer at the central focus point.

But how do businesses know what they are doing is right? With businesses crossing borders seamlessly since the globalization of the world economy, the customer base has widened significantly for every business. Every country has its demography and requires a different strategic approach. If you talk about online businesses, then the complexity of handling customers increases multifold.

This is where technology has been playing a very important role in the past few decades to help businesses navigate through the complexities of various aspects of the markets, they operate in. From online to offline, across different countries, and crossing borders, technology has been the enabler for businesses to ensure they achieve success in their ventures.

Businesses rely on analytical insights received through these technological advances to constantly monitor the performances of their various functions and strategies. These insights also prove beneficial to businesses because it helps keep themselves nimble, ready to adapt to the ever-changing demands of the market. One such useful report is the Path Length report, which we will cover in this article.

So, What Exactly do we Mean by Path Length

What Does Path Length Mean?

A path length is simply a record of the sequence of customer interaction. When you consider the journey of a customer, from the moment they first visit your website to the moment they complete a purchase, you will notice that the customer interacts multiple times with the various web content that you have created.

Let us consider you are into the business of gaming products. You have created a website that lists not only the various gaming products and features but also contains blogs about the latest launches and reviews, etc. So, when a visitor first comes to the homepage of your website, they are presented with multiple options – to search for a game they want, or read the reviews of the game, or see a demo video of the game.

Suppose a prospective customer searches for a game on Google. Your website is ranked among the top searches the prospective customer sees (Note – You must always implement the best SEO marketing techniques to ensure you rank at the top of the search results). Now, this prospective customer selects the search result and is redirected to your website. Now, this visitor goes to the section on your website that lists the various features and costs of the game. Next, the visitor goes to the section on your website where you have posted a vlog about the gameplay review. Finally, the visitor goes to the buying section of your website and makes the purchase.

The entire journey of the customer from the moment they searched about the product is the path they followed till they made the purchase, and this is what is meant by Path Length. Termed alternatively as URL path length, this is an indication of the number of interactions required by a prospect to get converted into a customer.

Identifying the Importance of Path Length

Is Path Length Important?

The example discussed above was a pretty simple and straight-forward case of customer conversion. But in real-life business scenarios, the customer journey is not so simple. For every step of the customer journey, businesses formulate specific strategies to ensure that the customer is provided the best experience and the customer is convinced of the next step towards the final goal of revenue generation.

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To analyze if these targeted strategies are effective or not, each successful step is considered as a conversion. Based on the needs of the business, you may define the goals which when completed can be termed as a conversion.

A path length will tell you the number of interactions required to achieve a conversion. This gives you an idea about the patterns of interactions between your various marketing channels and your targeted customers. This is what makes the path length important for any marketer because it gives them valuable insights about their target customers. As a marketer, you will understand how the target customers in the market reach each of your marketing campaigns and in turn, how effective your marketing campaign is to generate the greatest number of conversions.

Improve Lead Conversions with Path Length Reporting

Google’s Path Length Report

Google is undoubtedly the leading search engine of our times. Many businesses use the services of Google Analytics to determine how their businesses are performing and make strategic business decisions. Google provides Path Length reports which you can effectively use to gain insights into the conversion paths followed when you have funnels based on more than one channel.

Google Analytics provides the number of channel interactions the prospective customer took to convert. These numbers start from 1 and go up to 11, and anything greater than that is categorized as 12+. The Path Length report will provide you the number of conversions your campaign has achieved against each number of channel interactions. In other words, it is a representation of the number of interactions required by users to convert.

You can generate this report from Google Analytics by going to your navigation panel, and then clicking on the Path Length option on the left-hand side. Choose an activity and then customize the output data options to generate the report that will best help you to analyze the customer journey.

The current business scenarios are so dynamic that you need to be flexible and quick to ensure that you don’t lose out to the competition. Taking the help of the Path Length report, you can understand how much business you received from prospective customers who engaged with your content a specified number of times.

You should use the Path Length report in conjunction with the other analytical reports provided by Google Analytics such as the Top Conversion Paths report and the Time Lag report. This will ensure that you have a holistic idea of how the customer-channel interaction is taking place, and how much time or how many interactions are needed by a visitor to convert.