Google Analytics, Website Statistics, Conversion Analysis

Making Sense of Website Statistics

Have you ever heard the saying "You can't improve what you don't measure"? I remember the early days of the internet when people would put up a website with an ugly little green counter with the words "you are the 23,456th visitor to this site". These days it's generally just amatuers who put these counters on, and it's mostly for fun. If you are serious about getting the most bang for your buck on your website, you'll want to know a lot more about your visitors: who, how many, how often, for how long, and where from.

The answers to these questions can often reveal both holes and opportunities for your business. Let's take a look at a sample report:

To make sense of this lets start with a definition of Hits (the fourth column, and the highest number): A hit is simply any file requested from the server. That means that if someone comes to your home page and downloads the html page, the images which are on the page, a style sheet, or anything else, you could have 10 hits before they've even started looking around in your site.

Hit count isn't always the most useful measure for this reason. If you have complex graphics or a lot of elements on your web page, you might get a high number of hits purely because of that.

So to put things a little more into perspective, we measure the pages separately. Pages is the number of pages requested, and it will usually ignore things like images, javascript files, and stylesheets which are downloaded with each page automatically.

An even more useful measurement is Visits. Visits is the number of times someone comes and looks around. During a visit, a person might look at 1 or 20 of your website pages, download lots of images and files, potentially causing 100's of hits.

A visit is something of significance. You could equate it to a phone call in response to a newspaper ad. You want to know how many people called you to see how successful the ad is. It's probably not as important to count the aggregate time your operator spent on the phone, which is roughly what pages tells you.

To take it even further, we have Unique Visits. This is slightly better than just Visits, because it tells you in that month, how many people visited your website, regardless of whether they came back twice or three times. It is a better measure of the success of a campaign, because if we related it to the newspaper ad example, a person might call back two or three times asking for more information, but you don't want that to skew the response rate for your newspaper ad.

In the table above there are two rows with figures, the first being "Traffic Viewed" - this is what we want to know about as it relates to real visitors. The second row is "Traffic Not Viewed" and refers to traffic from automated software such as search engine crawlers, indexers, and internal software actvity.

Bandwidth is another measure which tells you how much data was downloaded from people browsing your website in that month. It can be interesting but is not particularly important in most cases. If you have a large number of videos it might indicate how often videos are downloaded, but there are better ways to find out that, so lets get into the meat of the report.

The detail in the next sections of the report shows you a month by month history of each of these measurables which helps you see the long term trends, or you can see a breakdown for each day of the month. Most of the time this detail is not important, unless you have a specific campaign and you want to see the initial response rate and the trailing response rate on subsequent days. There are other breakdowns which may be useful depending upon your circumstances:

• Breakdown by country: If you are running an international business it might be nice to know that your pentration into the US market is growing, for example.
• Top 25 Hosts: Ranks the IP address of people who spent the most time visiting your site (Page count)
• Authenticated Users: Ranks the pages viewed by people who have logged into your site
• Robots/Spiders vistors: Ranks the top 10 automated software which visited your site. You'll usually see search engines here, labelled "GoogleBot" or "MSNBot"
• Visits Duration: This can be useful as it measures the time in seconds people were at your site, and lists them by different time brackets. If you find that a large percentage of your visits are less than 30 seconds, it's possible that someone has seen your site and decided that: it takes too load, it's ugly, it's boring, etc. This is something you could try to address to keep your visitors there longer.

• Files Type: This shows what was downloaded most. If you have a lot of video files on your website, you can see how much they are being downloaded overall, and how this is affecting your bandwidth usage.
• Pages-URL: This lists the top pages viewed. This can be interesting as it shows that certain pages seem to be popular on your website. You might try to find out why and whether you can use that to your advantage.

Where are the vistors coming from?

It is also important to pay attention to the second part of the report starting at "Connect to site from" if you are interested in knowing where your visitors come from. In particular it gives you a list of how much traffic comes from each of the major search engines - an important measurement of the success of your search engine strategy. Below this it shows external websites that are driving traffic to you, and how much. If you have affiliate programs or advertising this is where you can measure the value of it.

Next we get something really important - search keyphrases. These tell you exactly what people are typing in to search engines to find you. This is very useful as you can optimise your website homepage to rank highly for certain keywords, or if you want to get some traffic for keywords that aren't showing up here then you may need some search engine optimisation, as people just aren't finding you that way!

Statistics on steriods - Analytics

In next months article we will be talking about website statisics on a whole new level - Analytics. Analytics allows to you track enitre campaigns and their effectiveness by tracking the attainment of set goals and cross linking that information with visitors sources, including integrating with pay per click advertising and Google Adwords. Why is this great? It allows you to see exaclty where your profits are coming from, and how to increase it.

For more information on how to use statistics to improve the results you get from your website, please contact one of our consultants on 1300 65 25 80.