SAS Web Analytics 5.2 - What's New? - Visitor drop-off, funnel and path analyses

Sep 13, 2026

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SAS Web Analytics 5.2 delivers and demonstrates new web analytics capabilities for collecting, analyzing, predicting, and reporting visitor behavior. The material explains how click-stream–based multichannel analysis supports a customer-centric view, improves understanding of visitor journeys, and strengthens conversion and retention. New capabilities include visitor drop-off analysis, funnel and path reporting, enhanced report creation and navigation, decision-support analytics with log data integration, and server performance improvements, plus page tagging and advanced reporting expressions.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time7 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Background

New Features Overview

SUGI 31 Applications Development Paper 016-31 SAS® Web Analytics 5.2: What’s New? Jonathan Polito, SAS Institute Inc. , Cary, NC ABSTRACT This presentation describes and demonstrates some of the new features of SAS Web Analytics 5.2. SAS Web Analytics collects, analyzes, predicts, and reports Web-site visitor behavior. This information helps businesses better understand the effectiveness of their online (and, potentially, offline) initiatives, and the information optimizes their Web site and business practices. These new features are discussed: • Visitor drop-off; funnel and path analyses • Report creation, navigation, and linking • Decision support analytics and integration of additional log data • Server performance improvements • Page tagging • Use of powerful expressions and synthetic columns in reports INTRODUCTION More and more information and more demand for attention are being streamed into the world. The competition to attract and retain customers is fiercer than ever. Globalization, the regulatory environment, technology, and more demanding customers make it imperative to be competitive and to distinguish your business from everyone else. A successful company uses a customer-centric approach; this is possible only by understanding all customer touch points. Many companies have built and invested in large data warehouse projects and software to help achieve this end. However, these companies have left off what is now becoming the fastest-growing customer touch point of all, the Web. By being able to understand this customer touch point with all the other customer channels gives you a complete view of the customer. This allows you to have a truer understanding and analysis of your visitors and allows you to improve conversion and customer retention rates. Most businesses or organizations have a Web presence now. Furthermore, the Web is capturing ever-larger monetary amounts and interaction opportunities. Many channels—from email, mass mailings, and TV ads to Web search engines—drive visitors to your Web site. By capturing your Web site’s click stream, you have a convenient integration point for the analysis of multiple data channels such as call centers, products, campaigns, e-commerce, and offline commerce and order completion. SAS Web Analytics 5.2 analyzes and reports on your multichannel data sources that are centered on your click stream. This paper provides motivation for this analysis, our philosophy regarding the analysis, and new SAS Web Analytics features that make this analysis possible. This paper uses the term visitor to refer to the originator of the click-event on your Web site. Alternatively, you can substitute customer or user for visitor. Visitor, while perhaps less specific, seems more accurate because all customers for your Web site are visitors, but all visitors are not customers. Moreover, a goal of Web analytics is to help you determine how to turn visitors into customers. This paper defines a visit as the visitor entering your site, viewing one or more pages and leaving. Also, this paper uses the term organization to refer to the Web site owner. Again, organization is more accurate than the term business , for the general case, because all businesses are organizations, but not all organizations are businesses. BACKGROUND SAS Web Analytics 5.2 uses a number of novel, as well as standard, methods to assist you in understanding your visitors’ behavior. SAS Web Analytics 5.2 provides a highly customizable extract-transform-load (ETL) process for reading your Web logs, associating the stateless individual clickstream records with a session and then analyzing and summarizing the session and clickstream traffic. This data resides in an optimized Web data mart for analytical reporting. A mid-tier Java Servlet and JSP-based Web application sits on the server data tier that hosts the Web data mart. SAS Web Analytics 5.2 provides two Web-based applications: SUGI 31

FAQs

What is SAS Web Analytics 5.2 designed to do?

It collects, analyzes, predicts, and reports website visitor behavior using click-stream data, then helps organizations understand effectiveness and optimize web and business practices.

Which new analytics features are highlighted in the material?

The document covers visitor drop-off with funnel and path analyses, improved report creation/navigation/linking, decision support analytics with integration of additional log data, server performance improvements, page tagging, and use of powerful expressions and synthetic columns.

How does the paper define a “visit” and “visitor”?

A “visitor” is the originator of the click-event on the website. A “visit” starts when the visitor enters the site, views one or more pages, and then leaves.

Sep 13, 2026

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