March 11th, 2010

Website Statistics

Every website does or should have some kind of web analytics to measure performance and to track visitors behaviour. One of the best and most well known packages available is Google Analyics - and the great advantage here is - its free!

What does Google Analytics Offer? Google Analytics is a powerful, free software tool that tells you exactly where your visitors came from and what they do when they actually get onto your site. In a nutshell it enables you to see:

• where your visitors are coming from
  
• which keywords they used to find you
• which links they click on
• which pages they visit
• which page they were on when they left your site
• how long they stayed for

How to Read the Statistics

• Visits - how many visits there were to your page. (A visit is defined as a page view when that user has viewed no other page on your site in the past half hour).
• Pageviews - how many times the pages on your site have been viewed.
• Pages/visit - how many pages, on average, users view when they come to your site.
• Bounce Rate - what percentage of users left after viewing only one page on your site.
• Avg. Time on Site - how long each user spent on your site.
• New Visits - what percentage of your users have not visited your site before.
• The Visitors Overview - how many visitors have come to your site.
• Map Overlay - shows the countries your visitors are coming from.
• Traffic Sources Overview - which percentage of users are getting to your site by typing your URL directly into their browser, and via search engines, referring sites, and other routes such as emailed links.
• Content Overview - the top five most viewed pages over the time period you're looking at.

The difference between Visitors and Hits

Visitors: A visit is when a person or robot visits your site. It consists of one or more page views - one visitor can visit your site many times. A visitor is the browser of a person who accepts a cookie.

Hits: Each file sent to a browser by a web server is an individual hit.

Which keywords have been used? Use the Google Adwords keyword tool to establish which keywords people type into the search engines to find sites which are similar to yours

What is the bounce rate? Bounce rate definition: the percentage of initial visitors who leave your site after arriving at the entry page without viewing other pages on your site. A low bounce rate means your visitors are exploring your website in greater detail and clicking through to explore different pages.

Conversion rate definition: The ratio of visitors who achieve a goal against their total website visitors (For example, if 5 visitors out of every 100 sign-up for your newsletter you have a 5% conversion rate for your 'sign-up to newsletter' goal). When people talk about their "website conversion rate" they are actually talking about their website goals conversion rate. 

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By Onika Staas | Posted in: Web Design Tips , Statistics and Analytics | 0 Comments