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Gaskins 1Sarah GaskinsDr. Craig PiercyMIST 7500October 15, 2009Web Analytics: An OverviewAccording to the Web Analytics Association, web analytics is the measurement, collection,analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.Divided into two main categories, on-site and off-site, web analytics is a tool designed to enable webdevelopers and web site owners (including blogs) learn enough about the performance of a web site andits visitors to understand how to increase web traffic and ultimately increase sales and revenue. Inrecent years, web analytics has become an increasingly popular component to the method of improvinga web site or blog's overall performance and optimizing its success as measured by target response.The first main category of web analytics is called

on-site web analytics

because it tracks andmeasures a visitor's progress

once he or she is on a specific web site

. The second category is called

off-site web analytics

because it measures a web site's

potential

, regardless of whether a visitor is or has been on a site. Measurements of on-site and off-site web analytics vary and are both useful tactics,however, the on-site side of web analytics has generally been the most used in that it comparesgathered data against key performance indicators in order to improve a web site's effectiveness. Off-siteanalytics simply measures a site's potential to succeed according to what is happening,comprehensively, across the Internet itself.Further, there are two approaches to on-site analytics: logfile analysis and page tagging. A basicsummary of differences between these two approaches would be 1)

Logfile Analysis:

Web serversrecord data on a logfile which is in turn available for data analysis providing information on a website's popularity; 2)

Page tagging:

This method was commonly seen in the form of web counters in the

Gaskins 2early years of the Internet, and it runs a small JavaScript code within the web browser each time a pageis requested, then sends the data to a remote server to be processed and display activity statistics for that web site.A multitude of companies provide on-site web analytics services and software, includingcompanies such as Webtrends, Inc., Omniture, Inc., and Coremetrics, Inc., and services such as GoogleAnalytics, Yahoo! Analytics, and Piwik, an open source, downloadable software program. In order tocomprehend and utilize these services to their fullest potential, users must first understand some basicdefinitions of commonly used terms regarding web analytics. As industry leaders work to lock in aglobally standard list of web analytics terminology, there has been some ambiguity and confusion over what many definitions actually mean for quite some time. For better understanding throughout thisdocument, here I will list some important, commonly used (and confused) web analytics terms asdefined by Wikipedia.

Common Web Analytics Terms

•

Hit

- A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis. Thenumber of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but thisnumber is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A singleweb-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which iscounted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrarynumber more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than thewebsite's actual popularity. The total number of visitors or page views provides a morerealistic and accurate assessment of popularity.

•

Page View

- A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. Anoccurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page viewmay generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and.css files) are also requested from the web server.

•

Visit / Session

- A series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a settimeout, often 30 minutes. A visit contains one or more page views.

•

First Visit / First Session

- A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits.

•

Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User

- The uniquely identified client generatingrequests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within adefined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within thetimescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor'scomputer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same

Gaskins 3 person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.

•

Repeat Visitor

- A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period betweenthe last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.

•

New Visitor

- A visitor that has not made any previous visits. This definition creates acertain amount of confusion (see common confusions below), and is sometimessubstituted with analysis of first visits.

•

Impression

- An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's screen.Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.

•

Singletons

- The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. While not auseful metric in and of itself the number of singletons is indicative of various forms of Click fraud as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identifyautomatons bots).

•

Bounce Rate

- The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

•

% Exit

- The percentage of users who exit from a page.

•

Visibility time

- The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.

•

Session Duration

- Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each timethey visit. This metric can be complicated because the length of the final page view cannot be measured.

•

Page View Duration / Time on Page

- Average amount of time that visitors spend oneach page of the site. As with Session Duration, this metric is complicated by the factthat analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view.

•

Page Depth / Page Views per Session

- Page Depth is the average number of pageviews a visitor consumes before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing totalnumber of page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views per Session or PV/Session.

•

Frequency / Session per Unique

- Frequency measures how often visitors come to awebsite. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the totalnumber of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure the loyalty of your audience.

•

Click Path

- The sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on agiven site.

•

Click

- Refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in asite to another.As a web site and blog owner, I have plenty of options to choose from such as those previouslymentioned to analyze my web site traffic and visitor habits. As a WordPress user, I am able to use aGoogle Analytics plugin called Google Analytics for WordPress, which I can easily install using my blog's control panel to track activity. However, before I analyze any data I must have activity on mysite, and in order to have activity, I must attract visitors somehow.