Fast Intro to Web Analytics
Overview
We’re not quite sure how to describe a portion of our business in “politically correct” terms. Often we’re called in to “clean up” the mess left by the previous web designer, web master, IT contractor, nephew, niece, or the kid next door. Following the parlance of some talk show hosts, we’ve coined the term WINO – Web-guru In Name Only. One particular area of irritation is the “web analytics” (and we use that term loosely) solution that was sold to the client. The worse case involved a custom application that had script on each page that wrote to a database and tracked… wait for it… page views only. Despite the fact that the developer had access to the server logs and could have used a free tool like Google Analytics, the client was charged for this custom add-on.
Page Views alone tell you absolutely nothing about the success (or failure) of your web site. Page views are just one metric out of many that you should be examining on a regular basis. This article will present an entry-level explanation to web analytics terminology. It’s our hope that this will prime you with questions to ask your web team. As always, if you need our input, we’d be glad to help. If you’re the DIY-type, check out our web analytics package.
The Basics
Monitoring is the only way to benchmark your web efforts. Whether your hosting your own site or having it hosted for you, you should have access to your raw server log files. If you don’t – ask your provider or IT staff. To make sense out of those logs, you’ll need to use a log file analyzer. There are several free log file analyzers available. We’ll discuss log file analysis in a separate article. Page tagging is another method to analyzer your web site’s effectiveness. Google Analytics, WebTrends, and other third party software applications utilize page tagging methodologies.
Any monitoring package should be able to tell you Duration, Hits, Page Views, Referrers, Unique Visitors and Visitors. Duration is the length of time a visitor is on your site. Accuracy depends on server session time out. This is a good reference to check for search terms but not a good metric for tracking. Hits are any call made by the browser back to the server. This could be for an image, a script, or a stylesheet. This is probably the most misunderstood term. Hits are not a reliable measurement of success. Page Views are the number of complete web pages requested from the server. This is a good measurement when viewed in the context of Number of Unique Visitors. Referrers are represented by the link that your visitor clicked on to get to your site. This is a good metric to watch if you’re running an advertising campaign or have your web site linked from other places. Unique Visitors are calculated by the number of visits to your site from a particular IP address. If you’re depending solely on server logs, this could be skewed by visitors behind a single firewall. Visitors represent the number of visits to your site. This could consiste of humans and/or robots.
Basic Web Metrics
At a minimum, you should be monitoring Page Views/Visit, Unique Visitors, and Referrers. There are many more metrics available – depending on the monitoring method you use – but we consider these core components to review daily.
Minimal Metrics
What’s Next ?
As a business owner, you’re comfortable with watching your P&L. You should be just as comfortable measuring the success of your web site with analytics. Whether your outsource this aspect of your business or manage it yourself with a tool similar to Veracity’s Site Analytics, it’s important that you monitor this aspect of your business.
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