Hi and welcome back to our introductory series on Web Analytics!
As promised (though a bit late for which I apologize), this time we’ll be looking at the terms commonly (and to my surprise often misunderstood) used within the web analytics community. For matters of convenience let’s just refer to web analytics as WA from this point on.
Even the best tools don’t mean much when we have no idea what it is they do or what to make of the results/data they present to us. Since we now know that WA can help us improve our website and increase our ROI on its development and upkeep, we best know what all those numbers mean, eh? And yes, I will do my best to explain the terms in the simplest way possible for those new to WA. Here goes…
Visitor
The visitor would be you with the browser. It doesn’t matter whether you visit just one page or you browse through the entire site. If you visit it, you’re a visitor. Keep in mind that WA applications draw a deep line in the sand when it comes to defining visitors because it isn’t just visitors who come to check websites out. Applications called bots also do the same thing. Search engines are the most popular users of bots. On regular intervals search engines like Google will send their bot out into the Internet (otherwise known has crawling) to find websites, follow links on every site they find and index the pages they find. Some WA applications might also present you with a report as to which bot came crawling through your site and when. This then could help you determine how effective your site mapping and page organization is.
Cookies
Obviously not the type you munch on. Basically a cookie is nothing more than a small text file that is sent just before a webpage’s content. Cookies are the most popular way of storing what is known as session data.
Sessions
Sessions are how sites keep track of who you are. Every time you visit a site a session is started for the very first request you make and ends either when you close your browser or your session times out. Session timeouts vary per website. Secure websites such as on-line banking sites usually have their session timeouts set to only a few minutes for security reasons. Most other sites usually have theirs at around 20 minutes. Sessions are very important in WA as they are the primary means of determining whether it’s your very first time to visit the site, have been wandering around for half an hour or whether you’re a returning visitor.
Pageview
When you requested to view this page you incremented this page’s pageview counter by one. That’s what a pageview is - a request to view a page. Pageviews are important in WA since they tell you which of your pages visitors keep coming and coming back to and which ones really aren’t all that popular. Pageviews are frequently confused with our next term, hits.
Hit
Hits count the number of files sent by a server. It really doesn’t matter what type of file is sent. If you had a webpage with 5 images, a single pageview for the page would result in 6 (no, not 5, 6!) hits – 1 for each of the images and 1 for the page itself. From a WA perspective they don’t really tell you how popular your site is.
Bounce Rate
A bounce is the term given to a session that starts and ends on the same page. As to whether you should be concerned with your bounce rate depends on a number of factors. If you have a home page agreement with a popular chain of internet cafes for example, every client that comes in would be redirected to your landing page the moment they fire the browser up. If they aren’t really looking into what you have to offer they’d most likely leave right away, increasing your bounce rate. Bounce rate numbers therefore must be kept in perspective. Remember – the idea is to drive traffic to your website. Not everyone is looking for what you have to offer. What you want is for those who are looking for what you’re offering to find you. Our next term might help you keep your bounce rate to a minimum granted that everything else is equal.
Referral Rate
The web is built up on links. One of the ways to increase your chances of ranking high on search engines is to exchange links with other websites offering products or topics in line with yours. This is what is known as referral. When a user follows your link from another website you get a referral from that site. How frequently your link is followed is called the referral rate. The referral rate therefore tells you which among your referrers are bringing in the most traffic to your site. To keep the bounce rate down you might want to exchange links with sites having content targeted at an audience not too far from yours. If you’re selling medicinal herb products you might wanna avoid exchanging links with a site selling performance exhaust and 20-inch rims. People visiting the herb site are looking for a cure, not a way to roll around in an import tuner on bling.
And there it is! Now that you’re familiar with WA’s various terms you’re ready to look into the different WA packages available out there. Thanks for dropping by. Hopefully I’ve been able to shed some light into WA for you. 
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