Gain insight into who is using your website, and how they are using it
It seems like everybody and their brother has a website these days. You have one. I have one. Actually, I have several. The question I have for you is this: how healthy is your website? You developed it for a reason, and you need to know if it is doing what it is supposed to be doing. How do you determine that? Analytics! Analytics are the tracking and evaluation of how your website is viewed and used. Virtually all web hosts have some sort of analytics software running. Mine happens to be running Urchin, which is a comprehensive analytics system. I don’t like its user interface, and accessing it is a bit of a hassle, so I’ve recently installed the very popular Google Analytics as well. These are just a couple of the many available options. This article is a primer on the basics of website analytics: what they are, why you need them, and what you can be looking for when you view them.
With any analytics software worth its weight in salt, you can learn a few basic things: how many people are visiting the site, what are they looking at and what technology they are using to view the site. Below I outline some particularly useful pieces of information that analytics can generate for you to shed some light on how your website is serving you.
Visits
A visit is when someone pulls up your site, looks at a page or two, then closes your site. It is possible for someone to pay you multiple visits on the same day. Analytics will also record first-time visitors. Visits are important because you can see roughly how many people are coming to your site over time (I like to see the data both weekly and monthly), and how many of those viewers are new to the site.
Here’s an example of how you can use this information: if your site is primarily a marketing brochure for you, and only 3% of the visits over a 90 day period are new visitors, chances are that you have a marketing problem. You are simply not reaching new potential customers or clients, and it might be time to modify your marketing strategy.
Page Views
A visit is composed of one or more page views. When you type www.angledend.com into your browser, you have initiated one page view (the home page). If you then click on the Portfolio page, you have now generated two page views. On my personal website, the home page gets the most traffic, followed a specific logo that I designed that is featured on the home page.
Let’s say that are selling a book on your site and the only way to order that book is from that book’s page on a larger website. If no one is visiting the page, then no one even has the opportunity to buy your book, so maybe you need to find a better way to direct traffic from your home page to the book page. On the other hand, if many people have viewed the page and no one is buying the book, then there may be a problem with the buying process, or maybe the book just doesn’t have enough of a “hook” to lure people to purchase it. Your analytics tools can give you insight about what is and is not working in your sales process.
Pages Per Visit
Pages per visit is the average number of page views that are consumed during a visit to your site over time. This is what is called a “calculated metric,” meaning that it is calculated from other pieces of information gathered through analytics. My site currently has 3.73 page views per visitor over the last month.
Bounce
A bounce is a single page view per visit. In other words, someone came to your site, viewed one page and closed out of the site. The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that ended on the page they started on. Bounces are not generally a good thing. The question to ask yourself if your bounce rate is high is “are there single pages that contribute more to this behavior than others”? You can find this out by looking at a single page’s analytics. The second most visited page on my site actually has a very high bounce rate, meaning that people are probably finding that page in Google search, clicking on it, and finding that page to not be relevant to them, then leaving my site. If you believe that they’re arriving there in error, then there may not be any reason to change anything, but if you think that your site content should be relevant to them, then maybe a change in content is in order.
Entrances and Exits
Entrances are pages that are the first page in a visit. An exit is the last page in a visit. Observing this gives you an idea of the most popular path that people take through your site, as well as clues about what compels them to leave.
Traffic Sources
Traffic is generally categorized into 3 areas: Direct, Referring, and Search. Direct is when someone types your URL into their browser (this generally means that they are already familiar with your site). Referring is when another site links to yours. For example, Angled End usually includes innocuous links back to our site on the home pages of our clients’ sites. That would make those client sites “referrers.” Search is, as you might expect, when someone searches for something on a search engine and then clicks on your site in the search. Through these statistics, you can see how users found you, and whether or not your search engine optimization efforts are returning on your investment.
Technology
You can tell a lot about your users through technology reports generated by analytics programs. For example, you can see what browser and operating system they are using, and even the users’ monitor resolution and connection speed. These are particularly useful when designing and building a website, since some web browsers (especially old ones) are more restricted than others in what they can display. Another example: if your site was created in Flash, you should pay attention to how many visits are coming from mobile web browsers (such as those used in the iPhone and Android smart phones), since most mobile browsers can’t view Flash.
Analytics Software Options
Nearly all web hosting companies have some sort of software installed to capture at least simple analytics, and those systems can usually be accessed by logging into your web hosting account. Some of their interfaces can be convoluted and confusing, however, so another option for tracking all of this info is to install Google Analytics on your site. It’s an easy install process, and the stats collected are displayed in an easy-to-use dashboard. If you need more information about, say, referring sites, you can view that fairly easily. I also have a lot of experience with an enterprise level application by Adobe called Omniture. Packages like these are not designed for amateurs, nor are they for small marketing sites. They’re highly complex, and there are entire professions and departments out there dedicated to such tasks. For the rest of us, I suggest Urchin or Google Analytics.
In closing, if you own or are running a website, get to know your statistics – they are a gold mine of useful information. Use them to ask evaluative questions like “why doesn’t anyone use my contact form?” or “what product are people looking at the most?” And then see if you can use what you learn to take steps towards powerful improvements to get you the results you want in your business.
Dan Lipe is a creative engineer at Angled End.