Web Analytics Terminology

One of the first steps in starting your own site is setting up server-side analytics. Why? Well first off client-side analytics is either expensive or hard to find. And because web analytics is critical to understanding the behaviour of your visitors and optimizing your website for them. The best web analytics application right now for the new blogger/publisher is Google Analytics.

You can’t go wrong with Google Analytics, its free, it works, and it provides you with all the stats you’ll ever need. However, all the stats it provides you with might not make much sense on first view. Here is an explanation of them :

Bounce Rate – My favorite metric. Its basically the rate at which people entered your site, and then didn’t bother to go elsewhere, effectively “bouncing” out of your site. For example, if your home page has a bounce rate of 99%, its an epic fail, and it needs redesign ASAP, as traffic to your site is suffering just because of that page. An overlooked error or a long loading time may be the cause of this.
Impressions – simplest of them all, its the number of times an ad is seen by visitors. This is an important metric when you’re considering signing up for PPM programs (more info here)
Visitors – the number of people who come to your site.
Page Views – the same as impressions, except its related only to pages viewed within your site. Can be furthered examined as Page Views Per Visit or Pages/Visit which is calculated as the number of pageviews divided by the number of visits. This describes the depth of visits of users. Its related to the bounce rate as a small Pages/Visit figure would mean a lot of your pages have a high bounce rate.
Avg. Time on Site – the average time someone spends on your site. You should try to get this over a minute for the least. This would rely almost entirely on the overall design of your site and how interesting it is.
Referring Sites – these are the sites which have some sort of link to your site which visitors clicked on and ended up on your site. This is an interesting metric as you can see how “viral” your site is becoming. A lot of referrals from Facebook, Hotmail, Digg, etc would be a good sign. You can build this through link exchanges with other sites, and using your website as a signature in forum discussions.
Direct Traffic – this is the percentage of people who came to your website on their own, i.e. without a referring website, mention on a forum or search engine. These are your loyal visitors, they bookmarked your site hence it is detected as “direct traffic” or traffic that comes from nowhere else on the Internet.
Hits – Its the number of “files downloaded” from your site. Unless your site is based on images, videos, downloads, this metric doesn’t really have much value to you. By file downloaded, we mean each and every file. So a pageview (showing images from your site, the html or php file itself, etc) may actually consist of something like 50 hits.
Keywords/Referring Keywords – this is found under the Traffic Sources section in Google Analytics. A very important metric. It shows the keywords used by visitors on search engines which led them to your site.
Browser Type – this is the percentage showing the type of browsers used by visitors to your site. Typically its Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and others, in terms of popularity. This can help you decide how to optimize your site for the majority of your visitors’ browsers.
Top Content – found under the Content section in Google Analytics. This basically shows you the top pages of your site, based on the number of visits they got.