Web sites are about communication. Communication is about people. So, it’s most appropriate we start our analytics primer looking at statistics about the people who visit your web site.
Although the data you see in your web analytics is analyzed to a certain degree, it’s important to remember that the data must be kept in context to be best understood. The type of web site you have, the purpose of the web site and other factors need to be considered as you look at your analytics data. For example, a blog web site is going to have different traffic patterns than a site set up to sell items.
Log into your Google Analytics web site and browse to the report of the web site you’re interested in learning more about. On the left in the menu, click on the “Visitors” link. The overview page gives you a lot of good information right off the bat (all measurements are assumed to be from a complete month, Google’s default setting):
- Visits
- This is the total number of times your web site has been visited.
- It’s good to see this measurement increase over time.
- Absolute Unique Visitors
- This is the number of individual visitors to your site.
- Although most likely rather accurate, there are instances where a small number of users might not be counted as individuals.
- Page Views
- This is the number of times all the pages in your site have been viewed by all visitors.
- For example: Visitor 1 goes to your site and views the home page only, then visitor 2 browses to your home page, clicks on the link for your contact us form, and then clicks on a link to your site map. The pages views for those visitors is 4.
- On a blog site, this number might naturally be small because people will read the posts on your home page and click away.
- On other types of sites, a low page views number might indicate visitors have problems with your navigation system.
- Average Page Views
- This is the average number of pages viewed per visitor.
- See the example for “Page Views” above.
- Time On Site
- This is the average time a visitor stays on your web site.
- If your site is primarily a blog site, this measure might be low if regular visitors come in and only read your new posts as they are published.
- On other types of sites, you want this number to trend up over time.
- Bounce Rate
- This is the percentage of visitors who land on a page in your web site and immediately click off to another site.
- Blog sites might have a higher bounce rate for the same reasons it might have a low page view count.
- You want to see this measurement going down over time.
- New Visits
- This is the percentage of visits by new visitors.
- This number should also be trending up to show healthy visitor growth.
Now, look back to the menu on the left. Click on the “Visitor Trending” link you’ll see the individual data points described above broken down by day. Unless you made some significant changes to your site and you wish to see how that change may have affected daily traffic, you might not want to get bogged down in the details of these individual reports.
Click on the next item, “Visitor Loyalty” to see some different data:
- Loyalty
- This shows how many visits were made by individual visitors.
- More visits means people like your content and return for more.
- If you sell things on your web site, this can show how much repeat business you have.
- Recency
- This measure shows how often visitors return to your site.
- If your site is a blog and you post often, you should expect higher numbers in the “more recent” categories.
- Length of Visit
- This is the “Time on Site” measurement broken down into detail
- It’s good to see longer visit times.
- Depth of Visit
- This measurement shows how “deep” visitors go into your site.
- If you run a blog, many of your visitors will read your posts on the home page and leave, so a higher number of ”1 pages” visits are probably normal.
- On other sites, you want visitors to drive deeper into your site. Higher numbers in the lower “pages” measurement may indicate either very good or very bad navigation on your site.
The next two sections are rather self-explanatory, “Browser Capabilities” and “Network Properties.” The statistics in those areas might be of more interest to the geek-oriented, but they are still worth checking out from time to time for everyone else.
What About Hits?
Some might wonder why there’s no listing for the number of “Hits.” Hits was used in the early days of web analytics as a measure of how popular a web site was. A problem arose with accuracy, and this is why: each time a request is made to a server, a “hit” is generated. The web browser makes an initial request for the HTML code making up a web page. Once that code is downloaded the browser sends another request asking for each element (images, embedded code, videos, etc.) to finish rendering the page. So, a page with a lot of images will generate more hits than a page with fewer. Some web designers would design their pages to generate inflated hit counts in order to garner higher advertising prices. Visits and page views are far more accurate measurements of a web site’s traffic.
Anything Else?
How often should you check your analytics numbers? I recommend checking in at least once a week. Google makes it very easy to do this with customized reports which can be emailed at an interval you choose. We’ll talk about that in another post.
Please feel free to leave comments with any questions you have.
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