Drill-Down custom reports – Personyze tutorial

I remember using several web analytics software before, but getting quick insight was really a pain. I was searching for a web analytics solution that will give me an easy way to drill down my reports in order to understand my visitor’s behavior. Most of the web analytics I know does it only one way: filtering the data as I drill down the reports. It means that the secondary reports are already built for you and it is actually like vertical filter of the same table which holds the data. I wanted a broader solution, something that will help me create dynamic drill down reports, which are based on a cross referenced data that I choose. Furthermore, I really wanted to have a breadcrumb view to show me my drill down point, which enables me to drill back or forwards to where I was before.

It seems that I am asking a lot from a website statistics’ solution. Well, I have found it yesterday, when Personyze made their update (also read about the UI update that was done at the same time). So, why I am so excited about the new custom reports drill down breadcrumb functionality?

First of all, a picture worth a thousand words, so let’s start with some images first.

As you can see in the above image, this is a snapshot from the “Keywords” report on Personyze dashboard. I have cut the area which focuses on the keywords “Personyze”. You can see a list of the keyword specific statistical data like: unique visitors, sessions, % new visitors, page views, avg. pages, avg. time, bounce rate, etc.

In the drill column there are three available custom drill down reports: Landing Page (1st), Segments (2nd) and Visitors (3rd). In order to drill down that specific “Keywords report” you need to click one of the icons.

I clicked the “Segment” drill down report, to show me what segments has occurred for that specific keyword.

When I clicked the “Segment” drill-down icon, the previous window now shows the segment summary sessions, which are the actual segments that happened to all the visitors who came from the keyword “Personyze”. As you can see, there were two segments which took place for that keyword: “people searched “personyze” and “condition_64″ (didn’t give it a meaningful name – so it got the a default one). Furthermore, you can see how many unique visitors have triggered every single segment, their total session time, number of total pages that were viewed, etc.

Furthermore, look at the part where I emphasize with a red square. This is the breadcrumb which I was talking about earlier in this article. You can clearly see that I came from the “Keywords” report and now I am in the “Segment” report (the last one in the breadcrumb). This is a very useful tool to just navigate within the drill-down reports.

Now I want to drill-down even further. Let’s say that I want to see where the unique visitor (nine of them) which have triggered the  “people searched personyze” segment. I click on the icon in the “unique visitors” column for the “people searched personyze” row.

You can click the above image to enlarge it.

As you can see in the above image, when I click the icon for “unique visitors” for that specific segment, which also was happened to that drill-down keyword, I get all the unique visitors that matched that segment. The report is of course a custom report, but this one also shows: Country code, Search Keyword(s), Referrer type (organic search, direct, internal, etc.), Session start time, total pages, total time in focus, etc.

Again, at the top part of the drill-down report, you can see the breadcrumb which signifies where I am in the drill-down process. I can go up and then down again. If I go up to the “Segment” report, the “list visitors that matched this segment” will still exist, preserving the data that was looking it prior to drilling up. I can click it again to go back down the drill-down report where I was before drilling up.

This is a very useful feature, and I am so glad that it is now an integral part of Personyze custom report functionality. It gives me a very large flexibility when viewing, analyzing and drilling my custom reports.

You can try that yourself by signing up for free to the Personyze trial offer and you can see it for yourself.

You can read all about personyze web analytics features here.