Google Analytics Explained, well almost… sort of
As i continue my transition from flash to html, SEO/Web Stats has become a topic of increasing interest, and one that ha the rare ability to at times dumbfound me. Installing Google Analytics on our site, has for the most part just been used to count our visitors and look at our traffic, so over the past week i thought I’d find out what some of the other lovely little percentages and numbers mean….
Unique Visitors
The Unique Visitors figure you have represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period(the date range you specify). A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
Bounce Rates
In my forum hunting and web searching for a simple and clear definition of bounce rate, I’ve found people throwing formulae around and others telling me to dismiss it all together if the site is not ad based. However, as with anything there is hope and I worked bounce rate to essentially be: when someone enters my site, lands on one page, and then leaves (exits) the site without ever visiting or looking at any of my other pages. Apparently, the general consensus I have found is that a site-wide bounce rate of over 40% is cause for concern. So for the past week, I was concerned, but the changes I am beginning t implement have brought my previous bounce rate of 71% to 38% in the space of a week. Mainly my navigation made it effort’ for people to just have a peruse, so making things easier for the user, they seem to be staying more. Pretty basic logic.
Exit Rates
This fell into place after figuring out bounce rates. Exit rates detail the amount of people who navigate away from your site entirely from a particular page. So for instance, if your home page has an exit rate of say 100%, this would be disastrous, as 100% of people would look at your home page and go away, not good! Although, there are situations where a high exit rate makes sense, lets say a ‘completed transaction page’ or a ‘thankyou for contacting us’ page. This is because the user has used your service and has no further reason to stay.
Visitor Loyalty
Bar a few certain site scenarios, wanting visitors to come back after they’ve visited in the past is a given for the majority of us. This tool is a decent indication of whether your blog is boring or not and how popular it is.
Visitor Recency
This stat looks at the number of days that have passed since a person’s last visit to your site. So you get to see how often people are coming back to read your blog ramblings. The ’0′ field means they have never visited before as there is no stored tracking cookie on that computer. This will probably be the highest number by a good margin.
Depth of Visit
In short the depth of visit report shows how many pages of your site, the user took the time to view. The depth of visit 1 goes to constituting your bounce rate. A high depth of visit, basically means user’s are enjoying whatever it is you have or are doing, as they are taking time to navigate through your pages.
There are flip sides to most of these analytic statistics that will be relevant to your website and what it is your trying to achieve, but as I delve further into Google Analytics, I am beginning to realise what a marvellous tool it is. Until next time…
Comments from others:
I find the Goal tab to be much more valuable than a lot of the stats you mentioned in the article. As a designer, you should use this tool to optimize your important pages.
- If you’re going to buy ads, the map overlay tool is excellent to identify regions to target.
- The Click Patterns > Site Overlay is awesome. You get to know what works and what doesn’t on your pages. I found out that one of the links I thought were the most important had a click ratio of 0.1%; it had to be moved.
- and so on. Analytics is a very valuable tool with a lot of potential.
Nice post.
There is a lot of functionality in GA that a lot of people probably don’t bother with/know exists (myself included and I’ve been using it for a long time). I too was concerned about bounce rate recently (just over 50%) on my blog.
But then, most of the visits come from google search where they type in a specific search term. I’m assuming they find what they want and then leave? I’ve since managed to get the bounce rate down to about 30%.
But I can’t help wondering, is the bounce rate as important on a blog?
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