Website Analysis Made Simpler
When you are operating an online business, it may often work to your advantage to have an active role in managing your website. As such, it is of great importance to understand some reasons that influence the success or downfall of your website.
As a webmaster, you must know how important it is to have visitors to your site. If you are really serious about your website or online business, you will not stop at simply knowing how many visitors you have. You have to delve deeper into the behavior of your visitors. For instance, you may want to know who they are, where they come from, which page of your site they often visit, and so on. There is a term for this — it’s web analytics.
Practically all web hosts offer web analysis as part of their basic services. However, many of them are not equipped with the right or more updated tools. Funnel reports, navigation reports, and segmentation reports are necessary in order to know how your visitors are coming along, where they are from, how much time they spent on your site, and what groups of visitors visit your site.
You can choose between Clicktracks Appetizer and Google for your web analysis needs. Clicktracks is free and you get to use the service almost immediately. Google is also free, but you need to set up an account first and that can translate to weeks.
All these may sound complex to the ordinary minds. They are quite simple but you need to be familiar with terms such as hit, page views, unique visitors, repeat visitors, new visitors, visitor session, referring search terms, referring URLs, content popularity, site overlay and bounce rate.
A hit is nothing more but a request for a file from your web server. A page view is also a request for a page type file. Meanwhile, unique visitors are people who view your website and the pages within your site. If that same unique visitor makes a series of requests in your site at one time, that is called visitor session. Repeat visitors literally mean what their name suggests — they are no less than clients who have been to your site before, while new visitors are those first-timers to your site.
People usually stumble upon your site through search engines, specifically by typing a key phrase on the search box. The key phrase used is called referring search term. Referring URLs are sites that lead visitors to your site. Content popularity contains a list of the pages within your site most often visited. Site overlay has your pages with an indicator beside each link indicating the number of people who have clicked that certain link. Bounce rate is the number of visitors who turned to a different page in your site.
Web analysis really does not have to be a complicated matter. Understanding it may take patience and dedication, but as soon as you know the basic terms by heart, you will find it a lot easier to grasp its concept.
