Path Depth

Path depth is how many steps beyond the entry point a user travels in a session, usually reported as the average number of pages or steps per session.

Path depth measures how far the user got in the journey, how many layers beyond the entry page, which is why it is not the same as path length: a user who bounces ten times between two pages has a large path length but a small depth, because they never went beyond two layers. The distribution of path depth is almost always right-skewed; most sessions are shallow and a small tail of deep sessions pulls the mean up, so the median often reports it more honestly. The common trap is treating more depth as always better; high depth sometimes means strong engagement and sometimes means the user did not find what they wanted and had to dig through many pages, and telling the two apart is impossible without the conversion rate or the page type beside it. The counting basis matters too: depth is defined per session, so a user who returns across three sessions produces three separate depths.