Navigation Tagging – Why it’s not enough

The simplest form of tagging you can do is Navigation Tagging.

Navigation Tagging only reports when a user navigates to a new page on the site.

No interactions are reported.

This is okay for sites that mostly care about a customer visiting pages, for example a blog.

But for most sites out there, it misses a key component about the customer.

Their customer journey.

Knowing what pages the user navigated through is not enough for a proper customer journey.

Most sites have multiple ways to land on the same page. I.e. their navigation is complex.

When a user leaves, you want to know what they did before leaving.

For example, a customer visits the first page of your site and leaves without navigating.

Some scenarios that could have happened :

• They scrolled through the first page and couldn’t find what they were looking for.
• They opened the menu but then couldn’t find the page.
• The on-page search didn’t help them find the page they were looking for.
• The site content is uninteresting.

Knowing what the user did before leaving gives you a hint of their reasons.

In the scenarios above, all except the last one suggest usability problems.

But even the last scenario can be mapped if you track the interactions.

By checking that a user didn’t interact at all with the page, it suggests that they got here by mistake.

Not tracking interactions leaves your analysts with limited understanding of your customer.

– Samy