The Internet Marketer» Understanding Analytics reports

Analytics upgrade gives even closer website scrutiny

Pete — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:47:01 +0000

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

Pete — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:30:50 +0000

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

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Analytics for business people | Visits & Site Usage

Pete — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:59:54 +0000

Visits chart

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

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.

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

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google Webmasters Tool | Top search enquiries

Pete — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:24:48 +0000

Top Search Enquiries is highly useful data that can provide valuable insight into how well your website is performing.

At a simple level it shows how you site ranks for various recent searches in different countries’ Google.

The data is displayed in two sections; Impressions and Click Throughs

Impressions

• % shows the portion of the top 100 searches this represents

• Query is the search that someone used

• Position is the highest Google ranking averaged over a week

So in this case 15% of searches for internet marketing featured the Succinct Ideas site and in those searches on average if ranked #15.

Click Throughs

Click Throughs shows how many searchers then visited your site, and confirms the proportion, keyword and ranking

Filtering

This report can be filtered to individual Google country of origin and for a selection of time intervals.

Interpretation

Top Enquiries provides a harsh reality check about search results that your site is being listed in, and begs the questions:

Keyword selection

Do these searches represent business opportunities for your business ?

- Are they unrelated to your business

- Are there too few searches to attract viable traffic volumes?

Ranking

Is your site’s ranking too low to attract viable traffic volumes ?

Conversion

If you site appears in search results why does no-one click on your SERP ?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.