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Website Analytics

A) What are website analytics?

Website analytics are data about the people who visit your website. Some of the most important information that website analytics provides are:
•    page views
•    unique visitors
•    traffic sources
•    bounce rates
•    conversion goals

By looking at trends and significant changes in the data, it’s possible to understand user behavior and the effects of marketing campaigns on your website. Understanding these behaviours and trends in your web traffic will help you identify potential problems and refine your site’s content.

There are many different services and software packages that allow you to track this type of information, and each has its own pros and cons. Almost all will require some form of installation or configuration before you can begin collecting data.

B) Tools and Software

There are two categories of tools that allow you to track website analytics:
•    Page tagging
•    Logfile analysis

Page tagging requires the addition of a piece of code to your website. This code allows the tool to collect user information as they browse your website. Tools that use the page tagging method can either be a web service, meaning that you access the tool through a third-party provider’s website, or software that you install and access on your own web server.

Logfile analysis requires the installation of one or more software packages on your web server. This software reads and analyzes transactions made between your web server and a user’s computer.

Due to the limitations in the type and quality of information it can collect, logfile analysis methods have fallen out of favour. The most popular and powerful web analytics packages available today use the page tagging method.

There are both free and paid website analytics services. The most popular and one of the most powerful free tools is Google Analytics, which is hosted by Google and therefore does not require any software installation. This is a good place to start if you’re looking to gain some experience without any major investment.

More advanced tools generally require payment for a license. Some of the most popular paid tools include:
•    Mint ($30/site)
•    Google Urchin ($9,995)
•    Webtrends (see website for price)
•    Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite (formerly Omniture, see site for pricing).

These tools all have pros and cons that should be evaluated based on your needs. For example, enterprise-focused tools like Webtrends are particularly useful if you are running a large eCommerce site and require more robust tracking and analytics.

C) Measurement and Evaluation

As a website owner, there are many benefits to using a website analytics package. Most importantly, these tools let you identify trends and spikes over time. You can then dive into the data and identify what caused the spike.

For example, if you launched a new advertising campaign, or your website was linked to from a popular website, you could measure the effects on traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.

Web analytics also allow you to determine how useful and effective your web content is to your users. You can identify the most popular pages and content, as well as the least popular. This information can help you understand the needs of your users and the type of content they are looking for. With this data, you can tweak the content and measure to see if there are any changes in your web analytics.

Finally, web analytics can help you identify critical problems with your website. If there are pages where you notice a large percentage of users leaving your site, or if you find that few users are completing the goals you set up, it may lead you to make changes to your content.

Some analytics services also allow you to do A/B testing, which sends a different version of a given page to different users. By comparing the results of the two versions, you can identify which one was most successful.

D) Glossary

Page view:

A page view is a single request from a user to view a page on your website. This metric is generally expressed as a total number of page views for a specific page or all pages on your website over a specific time frame.

Unique visitors vs. visitors:

Visitors is the measure of how many user sessions your website registered over a given period of time. One individual can register as more than one visitor if they return to your website multiple times during this period. For this reason, the measure of unique visitors is more commonly used. Unique visitors use IP addresses to ensure that a computer is counted only once, no matter how many times the user visits your site. 

Bounce rate:

A bounce rate for a website or page is the percentage of visitors who came to the page but very quickly left without viewing other pages. It is calculated by dividing the total number of visits with only one page view by the total number of visits. Bounce rates can be a useful indicator of how interesting specific pieces of content are to your users.

New and repeat visitors:

New visitors are the number of unique visitors that have never been to your site before. Repeat visitors measure how many unique visitors return to your website more than once. This can be further broken down by total number of visits.

Session duration:

Session duration is the average length of time all visitors to your site spent on it, or on a specific page. It can be a useful measure of how engaging your content is to visitors.

Conversion goals:

Many analytics packages allow you to set up goals that are accomplished by users when certain conditions are met. A successful goal is counted as a conversion. This is useful, for example, to measure how many users visit your website and successfully sign up for an email newsletter.

Sources:

A source is the last website a user viewed before visiting your website. Sources include organic search engine traffic, other websites that refer to content on your site, social media services, or even “direct” traffic, when a user inputs your website’s address directly into their browser.