Oct
12
Written by:
Web
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Written by: Nichole
You already know your websites purpose, now take it a step further and use your analytics to create success. Below are a couple tips to help better understand your web analytics:
Know the definitions:
In any analytic program, you should be able to find the definitions for what you are looking at. I have listed some definitions below:
Hits - a hit measures the total number of requests for text, images, and files your web server receives for a given page. Despite what software packages may lead you to believe, hits are virtually meaningless when it comes to actually understanding what users are doing on your site. Because the number of hits a site receives depends on how it's organized rather than how visitors interact with it, this metric is useful only in evaluating such information as server load.
Visits - The most common unit of measurement in site analytics is the number of visitors to a particular site or page. The trend in the overall number of visits to your site over time can give you insight into your site's popularity. Comparing the number of visits to each page is also a good way to identify which parts of your site are most useful to visitors.
Unique Visitors- This is the number of site visits by different users. If two people visit the site three times each, you'd have six visits by two unique visitors. Comparing visits to unique visitors can help you understand whether users are returning to your site over and over, or whether you are attracting a large number of users who only visit once or twice.
Page Views -This is the number of times any page was viewed by any visitor, and is often divided by visits to give a page-views-per-visit figure that represents the average number of pages each visitor viewed on a single trip to your site. Increased page views can indicate a more interesting site, or simply one that requires people to jump through hoops to find what they need.
Bounce Rate - The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).
Time on Page - This field indicates how long a visitor spent on a particular page or set of pages. It is calculated by subtracting the initial view time for a particular page from the initial view time for a subsequent page. Thus, this metric does not apply to exit pages for your site.
Traffic Sources - This gives you the percentage breakdown of traffic from Search Engines (and what percentage came from each search engine), traffic from Referring Site (perhaps which clients are your cheerleaders or if you were mentioned in an article or directory), and Direct Traffic (the people who knew your domain name and typed it in specifically to reach your site).
Keywords - Knowing what keywords your visitors are using to find you can help you further develop your content and target your market and tell you how long the average visitor spent on the site giving the keyword they used to come into the website. It can also help you determine if a keyword is too broad (and users are not finding what they thought they would from the keyword).
Content Overview - The overview page can tell you what pages people came into your site on (Entrance Paths), what keywords landed them on those pages (Entrance Keywords), what your top pages are (Top Content) and one of my favorites, Click Patterns
Be aware of your traffic
Traffic Sources - Do people type in your URL in their domain bar and land on your site? Or do they find you via search engines? Does most of your traffic come from Google, Yahoo or MSN? Perhaps most people really just come from 3 referring sites (facebook, twitter, businesses you subscribe to)?
By knowing where most of your traffic comes from, you’ll be able to better spend your time on increasing things that are already working rather than spin your wheels trying to get things that aren’t working to work.
What People Type In to Get To Your Site - Often time’s your site will be ranked for keywords that you would have never expected. The keywords people type in to get to your site may be completely different than keywords you were optimizing for.
Most tracking software will be able to tell you what people actually typed into search engines to get to your site. You should review this list periodically to see if you can find any keywords to intentionally target in the future.
Analytics can be intimidating, but they are a very useful tool when it comes to marketing your website and directing traffic to pages of your site. There are many tools to help understand analytics that include video tutorials and recommendations. If you are not using analytics, I highly recommend Google analytics that is simple to implement and offers a ton of information. At CS Kern, we offer a website management package where we will do an analysis of your current site, study your analytics and make recommendations based off of the data we collect. Feel free to give me a call to discuss how to make your website work for you!