Topic 4 - Web Analytics

1) Looking at the site usage, what does the terms visits, page views and pages/visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean and does it vary
much from day to day?

• Visits: The number of visits your site receives is the most basic measure of how effectively your promote your site. Starting and stopping ads, changing your keyword buys, viral marketing events, and search rank are some examples of factors that influence the number of visits your site receives. 
• Pageviews: Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a general measure of how much your site is used. It is more useful as a basic indicator of the traffic load on your site and server than as a marketing measure. 
• Pages/Visit: It is the average of pages viewed during their visit. 
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. The bounce rate does vary much from day to day. (Foliospace.com - 02/04/2011: 38.51%; 03/04/2011: 40.08%; 04/04/2011: 32.75%).

2) Now look at the traffic sources report. What are the three sources of traffic and where has most of the traffic come from?

The three sources of traffic are direct traffic, referring sites and search engines.

The most traffic for Foliospaces.com come from Direct traffic (43.88%).

3) What was the most popular web browser used to access the site?

Internet Explorer was the most popular browser used to access the site Foliospaces.com (51.56% visits).

4) How many countries did visitors to Foliospaces come from and what were the top four countries?

There were 75 different countries which visited Foliospace on the 5 April 2011. However, the four countries in order are Australia, United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand.

5) Having clicked every possible link on my analytics, make a few comments on:

(a) What you can track 

On Google Analytics we can track Visitor information such as:
Visitor Trends

• Number of visitors
• Number of absolute unique visitors
• Number of page views per visit
• Number of page views, average
• The average time spend on the Web site
• The bounce rate

Visitor Loyalty

• Number of times one person has visited the Web site
• How recent the last time a visitor visited the Web site
• Length of visit
• Depth of visit

Browser Capabilities

• Browser type
• Operating System
• Browser and operating system combinations
• Screen colours
• Screen resolution
• Flash version
• Java support

Network Properties

• Network locations
• Hostnames
• Connection speeds

(b) What you can track over time

We can track all this information over time through the timeline feature.

(c) What you can’t track

We can't track demographic figures such as age, income, gender and occupation.

6) What do the following terms mean? These are just a few, you may like to add some more and perhaps include them on the Moodle glossary.

High bounce rate: A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages are not relevant to your visitors.

Key words: A significant word or phrase, relevant to the web page or document in question.

Average Page Depth: The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session.

Click through rate: The number of times an ad is clicked on, divided by the number of impressions it receives.

Click: In Google Analytics reports, a 'Click' refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another.

Cookie: A small amount of text data given to a web browser by a web server. The data is stored on a user's hard drive and is returned to the specific web server each time the browser requests a page from that server. Cookies are used to remember information from page to page and visit to visit and can contain information such as user preferences or shopping trolley contents furthermore Cookies can note whether a user has logged in so that they do not need to authenticate again as they navigate through the site.

Impression: A display of a referral link or advertisement on a web page.

Hyperlink: A hyperlink points to another location in the same or another HTML document. This link there for navigates a user to another section of the page or to a new page or site altogether.

Navigation: Navigation refers to how you find your way from one page to another on a Web site. 

Pageview: A page view is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.

Session: A period of interaction between a visitor's browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time.

Unique Visitors (or Absolute Unique Visitors): Unique visitor is when the website identifies the user using an IP address.

URL: URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the combination of the protocol name and the domain name. This is used to uniquely identify and navigate to a web page.

Visitor: A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website.

Visitor Session: A Visitor Session is a defined period of interaction between a Visitor (both unique and untrackable visitor types) and a website.

Comparison shopping: Comparison shopping is when the shopper compares price, quality, features etc of one item against others before purchasing the item.