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Analytics upgrade gives even closer website scrutiny

October 22nd, 2009 by Pete

Google has upgraded Analytics to V4 with a host of new features to enable even closer scrutiny of your website’s performance.

This industrial strength yet surprisingly free website metrics system can help you understand more about how your site is performing and give clues on how to improve it to ultimately make it a viable contributor to your business sales activities.

The upgrade includes:

• More sophisticated goal tracking
• Better table filtering
• More flexible reporting
• A threshold based alerting system

Analytics for business people | Referring sites

Posted in Analytics Website Analysis

August 25th, 2009 by Pete

Referring Sites

Because of the important nature of referring traffic this module extends the Traffic Sources Overview to focus explicitly on where referrals are coming from.

Business Interpretation

Referring websites are just as important to your business as off-line sales referals;

They bring prospective clients to your site

You are being ‘recommended’ by the referee

YellowPages Online and other internet directory sites should also appear in this category if they are being used as part of your online promotion.

This referral data along with metrics like Pages/Visit will you to evaluate these sources as viable contributors to your business promotion.

If you don’t recognise the websites referring business to you, then make the effort to establish a relationship with them;you might get even more referrals!

Analytics for business people

This is one of a series of articles to help business people extract value from their Analytics reports.

Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?

Leave me a comment

Cheers
Pete

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Analytics for business people | Visits & Site Usage

Posted in Analytics Website Analysis

August 25th, 2009 by Pete

Visits chart

This chart shows the fundamental web metric, Visits displayed over the report period.

visits

Visits should be slowly increasing because you’ve been working hard to get more prospective clients to your website. It is quite normal for traffic to ease during weekends and holiday periods in a business website.

Site Usage

Visits	The number of visitors to the site Note this is not a direction correlation with visitors because if one visitor came to the site three times this represents 3 visits.
PageViews	The number of times a page was viewed or displayed If during a visit, a visitor viewed a particular page 3 times then this represents 3 page views
Pages/Visit	The average number of pages viewed in a visit This is a key metric as it represents the level of visitor engagement with the site.
Bounce rate	Represents the portion of visitors who leave the site immediately after visiting it i.e. they ‘bounce’ straight out of the site
Average time on site	Average period of time that visitors spend on the site
% new visits	The portion of new visitors to the site

Business Interpretation

As with any advertising, the business needs to gain exposure to prospective clients.

A healthy level of visits is paramount; particularly increasing over time.

Weekends, public holidays even school holidays can impact website visits

A good portion of new visitors who represent new prospective clients is also key.

The Pages/Visit signals the level of visitor interest and is particularly useful in later report modules to make judgments about the value of traffic sources etc.