Let's Get Analytical

The leading story in our October eNewsletter [subscribe here] paints a picture of a CEO & his Marketing Director stumbling through the initial stages of what you're about to learn below. Don't be Johnson, or Thompson, and don't be Sir. Instead, spend time with this post and start out on the next step to making sure your website is fully leveraging your business goals.

Introduction

You've got a website. People go to it. Now, how do you know this? People have told you so. Or they filled out a contact form. The latter of these two is actual proof.

Are you resting on any other proof of people's visits to your site? Do you have any idea how long they're staying on your site, or what pages they're visiting most? Or if they're coming back, and how often? Or how they even found your site in the first place?

Enter the world of web analytics. Those of you who know of the term and are possibly already reviewing your analytics can skip down to the "You're tracking traffic to your site. Now what?" portion of this post. That's where we'll help you gain a better understanding of how to leverage certain data sets from your analytics to gain more insight as to how well your site is performing.

So what are web analytics exactly?

Web analytics is the study of the online behavior within one's website. It's great to know how people are navigating your site and how many are visiting, among many other statistics, but there's no point in monitoring your web analytics unless you use the data to improve your site.

On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

And what information can you see with web analytics?

Depending on which software (online or offline) you're using to track your site's traffic, you can view many or most of the following:

• Hit - A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity. The total number of visitors or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity.
• Page View - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.
• Visit / Session - A series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a set timeout. A visit is expected to contain multiple hits (in log analysis) and page views.
• First Visit / First Session - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits.
• Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User - The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. The Unique User is now the only mandatory metric for an ABCE audit.
• Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period between the last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.
• New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits. This definition creates a certain amount of confusion (see common confusions below), and is sometimes substituted with analysis of first visits.
• Impression - An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's screen. Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.
• Singletons - The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. While not a useful metric in and of itself the number of singletons is indicative of various forms of "Click Fraud" as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identify automatons ("bots").
• Bounce Rate - The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.
• % Exit - The percentage of users who exit from a page.
• Visibility time - The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.
• Session Duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view. Also, if a visit comes back to the site within a short period of time, that can be measured as a continuation of the first session.
• Page View Duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on each page of the site. As with Session Duration, this metric is complicated by the fact that analytics programs cannot measure the length of the final page view.
• Depth / Page Views per Session - Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views per Session or PV/Session.
• Frequency / Session per Unique - Frequency measures how often visitors come to a website. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the total number of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure the loyalty of your audience.

How do you get analytics running on your own site?

The few major analytics programs today make it easier than ever to start collecting data on your web traffic. It can be free, can take less than a few minutes to get going, and can be done wrong causing headaches and frustration.

Traction is in total love with Google Analytics, arguably the most popular and robust of today's available web analytics software packages. It's super simple to setup and has very clean, easy to understand, scheduable reporting. We'll use them as our examples for the rest of this post, but first, here's a video (from an overly enthusiastic gentleman) explaining how easy it is to install the code and be on the path to analytics town.

You're tracking traffic on your site. Now what?

Google Analytic's interface is pretty simple, but has many advanced features hidden below. These advanced features are fairly easy to implement, but it takes a while to understand what they are and why you need them.

We could throw up multiple screenshots of the analytics on our site, but it's so much more effective to give you another couple videos to watch. And who better for it to come from than Google itself? This final step for this post takes you through the interface and some intermediate concepts in reading your data. There's a lot to be learned here. We suggest opening your analytics in a separate tab or browser window while watching, and follow along. We learned plenty from this video, and others, from Google.

In Closing

Now that you've had a good primer on web analytics, and you know that Google Analytics is kind of a big deal for analytics reporting, we suggest you get this going on your website ASAP and dive into those reports on a regular basis. As always, if you hit a hurdle you can't jump over, find that there's a problem with how users navigate your site, or find that your traffic isn't what you'd like, we're here to help.

Looking for more advanced tips and techniques regarding Google Analytics? See their YouTube channel here. 

Interested in reading other posts about industry trends in the ad biz? Click here to see the rest.

Have any questions for us? Want to share what you learned from this post? Or just want to throw a shout-out to the world? We encourage commenting below.