PricewaterhouseCoopers: Following visitors’ footsteps

A page tracker that successfully traces a user’s path across the whole website.

The Site

Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the major international management consultancy, has a navigational guide on its global website that allows visitors to track their journey around all sections of the site.

All pages bar home have a ‘Recently visited pages’ heading in the left-hand navigation panel. As a visitor moves between pages a hyperlinked five-item list builds up under the heading, with the most-recently visited page added to the top (and the oldest pushed off). This continues to happen for journeys that move into other sections of the site as well as within the current section. The tracker disappears if a visitor leaves the global site for another Pricewaterhouse Coopers site, for example, a country careers page, but should they return it picks them up again at the point at which they left.

The Takeaway

Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ page tracker is essentially a presentational variation on a breadcrumbs trail, the standard ‘Hansel and Gretel’ device that allows visitors to retrace their steps through a website. However, it appears to have eradicated the big stumbling block associated with a breadcrumbs trail, which is that it only works in a particular section of the forest and breaks down if you move into other parts of the wood. Here, you can wander from Industry Sector to Press Room to press release to About Us and be just a click away from doubling back to pick up a path or follow a new fork in the road.

How do they do that? The fact you are picked up again if you return from an off-site trip suggests that the system is adding cookies to your browser to aid recognition. This is confirmed by disabling the browser’s cookies feature, in which case a message appears under the ‘Recently’ heading to say that cookies must be enabled “to activate this functionality”. Conversely, the site’s Privacy statement rightly points out that anyone uncomfortable with this functionality can switch off the cookies option in their browser.

First published on 06 April, 2006