SEO Sunday: Understanding Analytics
By Keith | Sunday, June 6th, 2010So you’ve built your killer website with great content and you’re getting some search rankings for your targeted keywords, but if you don’t have web analytics installed, you’re only really guessing. Analytics are the best way to measure your traffic, from where people are coming from to where they’re going to, but they can be a little daunting at first. Today, we’ll go over some of the basics of web analytics.
Installing web analytics
There are different types of web analytic software available, from free versions (like Google Analytics) to paid versions (like Omniture), but nearly all analytics software share one thing in common: tagging. The first step to any analytics implementation will involve tagging your webpages with some form of script (usually JavaScript), and it can be simple or complex, depending on what you want to track, and how deep you want to understand your traffic.
Terminology
There are quite a number of elements to analytics, and the terminology can be a little daunting at first, but once you start to understand the subtle nuances, it makes a lot more sense.
Hits VS Visits
Once upon a time in the days of hit counters, web traffic was measured by “hits”, a hit to the webserver. Often, websites would install a “hit counter” that usually lived on the bottom of the page. Hits were not an accurate measure of traffic, as they could involve graphics, java applet, html file, etc. So, if a site had 79 small graphics on the page, every visitor to the site registered as 80 hits on the server (79 graphics plus the html file). 80,000 hits could translate to just 1,000 visitors, not to mention the number of times the page was reloaded or visits from web spiders or other such bots. Visits, is a more accurate measurement of website visits, as it often involves logging a single IP address, not multiple files being loaded. To summarize, hits are a thing of the past.
Vists VS Visitors
Although they appear similar, Visits have a slightly different meaning than Visitors. Simply put, Visitors are the measurement of users who visit the site, while the “visits” are the measurement of each individual visit. Visitors can be categorized as “New” or “Returning”. So, for example, a new user visits the site on Monday, during that visit they will be tracked as a New Visitor. When they return on Tuesday, that during that visit they will be tracked as a Returning Visitor. It can be a little confusing, but the differentiation is important.
Bounce Rate
The Bounce Rate is a measurement of users who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continuing on through your site. A visitor can bounce by clicking a link to a different page, clicking the BACK button, closing the tab or window, typing in a new url, etc. In simple terms, the bounce rate represents the number of users who didn’t like what they saw on whatever landing page they arrived at your site to. This is different than an “exit rate”, which is the percent of users who exit from a page after navigating through a site.
Goals
More robust analytics packages will allow a user to set up what is known as “Goals”. Goals are simply a path or funnel that you want to track how users navigate through. For example, you have a receipt tracking subscription service that has three pages for the sign-up process: signup.html, payment.html, and success.html. A goal will track all the users who navigate through these pages, and will tell you who did and didn’t complete the goal, along with other useful data like what page they navigated away to, the exit rates, etc. This is especially useful for improving your sales pages or Pay-per-click campaigns.








