Using your analytics data to improve web site performance

It's one thing to look at your reports, its another to start to draw conclusions from your data. Different people will look at the data in different ways. Most often, the reports are looked at by the marketing department/person to see how to better market the site, what Search Engine optimization needs to occur, and measure the effectiveness of their pay-per-click ads. All of these are important uses of the web analytics, but they are not the only uses. I want to look at a specific example … [Read more...]

More Metrics – Where Your Visitors Come From

Learning how our web site works is an important task. We've seen some simple examples in previous steps (visits, page views, and unique visitors) as well as determining how long someone visited your site, and which was the last page they viewed. We've shown how some pages are viewed more than others, and where people exit your web site. We've even shown what pages people come to your web site. What we will look at now is how did they get to your web site. Before they were on your web site, … [Read more...]

More Metrics – exit pages and bounce rate

Learning how our web site works is an important task. We've seen some simple examples in previous steps (visits, page views, and unique visitors) and we've seen some data that gets calculated (average page views and time on site). While these were simple, and often given on the front page of your reports, I want to look at two related pieces of information that are not always so prevalent: exit pages and bounce rate. The Exit Page is an easy metric to understand. This is generally a list … [Read more...]

More Metrics – Pages per Visit and Time on Site

Learning how our web site works is an important task. Learning how to properly measure it is even more so. We have to look at not only the data, but we also need to know what questions to ask when looking at the data to put it into the correct perspective.There are a couple of "obvious" measurements mentioned in the last article (visits, page views, and unique visitors). While that information is often raw data, and easy to display, we will now look at some data which most systems will … [Read more...]