Web Site Analytics Part 1
Posted by Mary Gammel on July 5, 2009 under Web Analytics | 
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Even though there are many free tools out there that can help, businesses often don’t know how their website is performing for them or how many new customers they’re getting from their web site. This article focuses on web site analytics tools that can help answer these questions.
What are web site analytics?
Website analytics provide web site owners with data that can be used to improve a website’s traffic and search engine optimization. For example, you’ll get statistics of visits, pageviews, and referring websites. It also gives owners insight into how people use the site such as how long they stayed on the site and what pages they viewed along with the visit’s starting page.
Understanding website analytics terms
You’ve probably heard of web site hits, but website analytics packages go farther than just measuring how many times pages were displayed on a site. Here are a few of the common terms:
- Unique Visitors – the unduplicated number of people who visit a website
- Pageviews – number of times website pages have been accessed by visitors. For example, a visitor views 5 pages during one visit.
- Bounce Rate – the percentage of initial visitors to a site who leave to a different site, rather than viewing more pages within the same site.
- Landing Page – the first page viewed by a visitor when they arrive at a website, not necessarily the home page.
- Direct traffic – visits resulting from users typing in a URL directly in their browser.
- Referring Site – A website that a visitor used to get to your website, includes search engines and social networking sites as well as other sites that from which your website is linked.
What is web site analytics software?
Website analytics software generally runs behind the scenes of a website. One common tool is AWStats, which is often provided by website hosting companies. Another is the free Google Analytics tool, which website designers and site owners can install for each page of a website. These tools usually have their own dashboard or control panel from which you can view statistics and configure reports.
Related Links
For more information on web analytics, check out the related links below:
Quick Tip:
Most website analytics tools will allow you to email PDF reports directly to yourself monthly, making it easy to keep track of how your web marketing efforts are doing.
Did you know?
Quality Web Site Testing can assess your website to determine if you have website analytics enabled. If not, we can work with you to enable analytics that are compatible with your website. If you have analytics, we can work with you on effective ways to use them to increase traffic and customers.
More information about Web Analytics can be found in Part 2 of this article.
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