An Intro to Web Analytics

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By Lance R. Haynie | May 9, 2008

Well it seems that I have yet to write an article on web analytics, which is a focus of this blog. Web analytics in a nutshell is the study of the behavior of website visitors. You may ask a few questions such as why is this important, or what should I track? I will touch on both of those topics.

First off, why is it important? Web analytics are the ultimate and virtually only way to really track success and your return on investment. You have to be able to see where your traffic is coming from to know if your marketing tactics are working properly. You also need to know how your visitors react to your website. Do they click then leave? Or do they surf your page a bit. What content do they like best, maybe you should make more like this.

There are a few ways to track information about your website visitors. You can use logfiles, or webalizer normally come free with any hosting package. The problem with those solutions is that they are not very robust, nor reliable. There are better solutions that are a paid solution such as Urchin and Omniture. These solutions are very robust and will help you to track your visitors better than ever thought. Now if you are on a budget your best option to me is Google Analytics. I personally love this software; it is free of charge and is based on Urchin technology.

Now to the next part, what should I track? I personally believe that you should track as much information as you can. I use stats to improve everything. For instance, tracking your visitors browser can tell you for which to optimize first. Granted being optimized for all is your best scenario, being optimized for what your viewers mainly look at your website through is your first start. You can also track your visitor’s resolution, while you may have a nice widescreen Power Mac, your users could be on an old PC with 800×600 and you need to optimize layouts for your viewers. I generally go for the lowest common denominator so everyone can see my content the way I want them to.

Your most important are going to be of course your visitors by page views and visitors by unique hits. I often see a lot of people get the two confused. I assume because some software refers unique as just visitors sometimes, and then page views. Unique hits are unique visitors, you are viewing my website now, and you account for one unique hit. If you visit 5 pages on LanceHaynie.com then you are one unique hit and 5 page views.

You should also pay very close attention to details such as bounce rates, this is the rate at which people “bounce back” aka, hit the back button on their browser. Generally for whatever reason they did not come to the page that they thought they would get or were expecting. The ultimate goal is conversions, whatever you may be trying to convert them to.

Make sure to always keep track of this information if you want to have a successful site, web analytics is the only way that you can accurately tell how your site is performing, and which parts are performing the best.

If you have any questions about Web Analytics or Web Marketing you can contact me at lance@lancehaynie.com or fill out the form on the right and I will get back with you.

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