Visualizing Website Pathing With Network Graphs by Randy Zwitch.
From the post:
Last week, version 1.4 of RSiteCatalyst was released, and now it’s possible to get site pathing information directly within R. Now, it’s easy to create impressive looking network graphs from your Adobe Analytics data using RSiteCatalyst and d3Network. In this blog post, I will cover simple and force-directed network graphs, which show the pairwise representation between pages. In a follow-up blog post, I will show how to visualize longer paths using Sankey diagrams, also from the d3Network package.
Great technical details and examples but also worth the read for:
I’m not going to lie, all three of these diagrams are hard to interpret. Like wordclouds, network graphs can often be visually interesting, yet difficult to ascertain any concrete information. Network graphs also have the tendency to reinforce what you already know (you or someone you know designed your website, you should already have a feel for its structure!).
Randy does spot some patterns but working out what those patterns “mean” remain for further investigation.
Hairball graph visualizations can be a starting point for the hard work that extracts actionable intelligence.