Using Analytics on Your Site - Basic Analytics Measurements
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Here we discuss basic web analytics measurements universal to all analytics software programs.
Visits - total number of visits to the website.
Page views - number of all page views in total.
Pages Per Visits - average number of pages users sees per visit.
Bounce Rate - percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without clicking on anything.
Average Time On Site - how long people stay on your website
These are the core metrics in all analytics programs. They give you an overall look, but to find real value you have to dig a lot deeper into statistics such as monthly comparisons, trends and segmenting, which can sometimes answer the "why" question.
Traffic Sources
Understanding traffic sources is straightforward. There are search engines, PPC search ads, contextual networks, direct traffic, RSS readers, email, and affiliate/link referrals. Each traffic source can hint at intention, and measuring sources is essential to finding out your strong and weak spots.
For instance, if most of your traffic is from search engines, with a small percentage of direct visitors, chances are you have a weak brand. Focusing on brand building can thus increase direct traffic. Let's take a deeper look at traffic sources:
Search Engines - Google, Yahoo, Live, MSN, AOL, Ask, Altavista, AlltheWeb, Netscape, etc.
Referring Sites - These include directories, links from other websites, blogs and banner ads. By exploring referring URLs you can sometimes learn why users clicked on the link. If particular links send you a lot of qualified traffic that converts, you might want to establish a commercial relationship with that site owner.
Direct Traffic - Those are visitors who directly type in your address or land on your pages through a bookmark. This is a sign you have a strong brand. Direct traffic is free and usually converts well.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate shows how many visitors land on your website (PPC, search, direct, etc), and then click the back button or close the window. Basically they leave without doing anything. The down side of this measurement is that the bounce rate on a site-wide level does not tell you much. You have to drill into each page, measure its bounce rate and only then make conclusions.
Page Level Bounce Rate
Why is measuring bounce rate on the site wide level wrong? You may change the wrong stuff. The site wide bounce rate is an average sum of the bounce rate from all of your pages. One page can be doing well, while another one is not. How do you know which one is doing well and where you need improvement if you only look at your site wide bounce rate?
By exploring each page one by one and by studying bounce rates, you can spot pages that are doing well in terms of this measurement and ones that need changes.
Next: Measuring Conversion Rate >>
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