In today’s Web 2.0 world, traffic is your currency. How many people go to your website, how many return, how many other websites link back to you are just some of the things that determine how popular your website is and how far up the search engine results your website appears with any search. Google offers a free tool for web analytics (or metrics, depending on which side of the pond you’re on) that anyone can use to measure their website statistics.
So perhaps you’ve already heard of Google Analytics, or like a good little SEO-compliant Webmaster, you’ve already signed your website up for this tool. But what in the name of Harry Potter do all those numbers really mean? What is important and which can you just ignore? Google Analytics offers a vast array of information for their subscribers. However, for basic users, there are really 4 items which are most important in the world of web analytics:
- Visits Vs. Absolute Unique Visitors – which one is really more important?
Well some may think gauging the number of visitors is enough to tell if you have a good website, but if a business, for example, has 20 employees and they visit the website 10 times a day, then that would register as 200 visits. Visits just tell you how many times people have logged in, regardless of whether they’ve been there before.Unique visitors, as the name implies, measures how many individuals have logged on to a website for the first time. First time visitors have many implications, but most importantly, unique visitors indicate that people are being referred to a website via good sources and attracting new viewers.
- Average Page Views– this is a good indicator of the quality of visits you get from your audience.
A high number indicates that people actually view more than one page (usually the home page) on your site. This means that after viewing the first page, users like your site enough to look at other pages.
- Time On Site – This could be considered Average Page View’s younger sibling. This is the amount on time that people spend on your site.
However, be warned, as this can be misleading – think of how many times you’ve gone to a website and then gotten up to go get a snack. You may not have intended to stay on that site for long, but you did anyway. In most cases, this is pretty reliable, but make sure that when compared to Average Page Views, the numbers aren’t too far off.
- Bounce Rate – Perhaps this is the most confusing of all the categories. Bounce rate is simply how many people (or percentage of people) leave the website immediately after viewing the first page.
Why would you want to know your bounce rate? Well, high bounce rates indicate that while a user may initially want to visit your website (perhaps through well-placed links on other quality websites), when they reach the actual site, they become turned off and immediately move on to another page. This means that your first page is not compelling enough and may need to be overhauled.
Google Analytics can be a very useful tool – but like any tools, the person wielding them must have the right knowledge in order to use them well. And when you’ve learned how (or we’ve helped you) to use them, you’ll be able to tweak your website to increase your visitors, and turn them into customers.
Interested in getting analytics installed on your web site? We can help. It’s affordable (Starting at just 99$ for installation of the Free Google analytics (on a 10 page site) and worth its weight in gold if you use it correctly!
