A Little Help with Web Analytics

If you're just getting started trying to read your site metrics using Google Analytics or another application and don't really know what you should be looking at, here's 3 things that can tell you a lot about who's coming to your site and how they're getting there.

1. Unique Page Visits
It's important to distinguish between visits and 'hits.'  Hits are each time a page (or any file) is served from your Web host.  If your pages have a lot of images on them, or if every employee in the company has the company home page set as the default page in their browser, you might be getting a lot of HITS but not a lot of valuable VISITS.

2. Referring Sources
By looking at where your traffic is coming from, you can tell a lot.  If most of your traffic has no 'referring source' it generally (though not always) means that people are directly typing in your URL to get to your site. 

If they are coming from a Search Engine such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN, you can also drill down and see what keywords (or search terms) they used to find your site. 

If they are coming from another Web site, you might want to see what page they are being directed from.  Maybe your company is mentioned in an article, or a partner link.  I've actually found out that I've won a design award just by doing that, so some times it can be good news.

3. Top Content
By seeing what your most viewed pages are, you can begin to learn about how your Web site visitors are actually USING your site. 

Web analytics is not an exact science, and there is generally a lot of interpretation that needs to be done, even by the most savvy experts out there, but there's a few things that you can detect fairly easily.  First of all, unless you have a lot of advertising or inbound links to very specific pages in the lower levels of your site, your home page is going to be one of the highest traffic-yielding pages.  This is not going to be a surprise to anyone.  Where it gets interesting is when you start to see what the other top content pages are. 

Again, unless you track users' exact actions, you can make deductions that might not always be true, but if your home page is the page that gets the most hits, and your "Services" page that is one level down in your site's navigation gets the second most hits, I would say you can safely assume that most people first come to your home page, then click the "Services" link.  That in itself is pretty valuable information.

And from there you can spend as much, or as little, time as you want to.  I hope that helps a little.

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Greg Kihlstrom is the Creative Director at Carousel30, a Washington DC Web Design and Development firm

Comments

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