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Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization and BlogsWeb Analytics
‘Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage’ (Web Analytics Association).
What this means is that web analytics is a way of measuringthe traffic to your site or page as well as it can give you some insight as to howpeople are using your site. For a successful website it is important for your web siteto “think” like your users and web analytics can help you achieve that goal for yoursite. Web analytics can be applied to any web site on the Internet. Any site from e-commerce to a blog can use web analytics.An overall goal in web analytics may be to get a web site to “think” like thepeople that use it, but how does a web site get to that point? Web analytics shouldbe thought of as a series of goals and not just one goal. The first step in applyingweb analytics to a site is to define the goals. These goals can be set without everlooking at data related to web analytics. The goals should relate to goals of theorganization as a whole (Netminers). For example, let us assume the site inquestion is for a new online bookstore. The goals of the web site for the store couldbe:
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Reach potential customers
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Interest the potential customers
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Convert potential customers into paying customers
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Retain Customers The next step in the process is to measure the site against the goals thathave been set. One question that may come to mind is that if so many differenttypes of sites can be measured with web analytics, what exactly gets measured andhow is it applied? There are several common measurements that can be gatheredand applied in web analytics. These measurements include page data (hits, pageviews/bounce rate, downloads), user data (visits or sessions, unique visitors, returnvisitors), and navigation data (traffic sources, back navigation rate).
Page Data
Page data includes a number of different measures. These measures arehits, pages per visit, bounce rate, page views, unique views, landing pages and exitpages. Hits will simply count the number of times something from the page isrequested. Page views take hits to the next level. Page views will count thenumber of times that a specific page on the Web site is viewed. Visits or Sessionsare even more specific by gathering information on how one specific user navigatesthrough the site and will also provide detail on how the site is generally used. Thenext step from visits and sessions is to count the number of unique visitors to the
 
site. Measuring unique visitors is important because, depending on the goals forthe site, it may mean more to have several unique visitors who visit occasionallythan to have one or two visitors who visit frequently. In addition to measuring dataassociated with users, the traffic sources can also be measured. Measuring trafficsources will explain how people are getting to the site. One additional measure isto look at what content is viewed on the site and how often.
Hits
 The number of hits on a site is perhaps the most basic measurementgathered in web analytics as well possibly the most misunderstood. Many timeshits are also the measurement which provides the least amount of data. A hit isdefined as a request for a single item on a web page (Summary.Net, 2002). By thisdefinition, a single Web page could generate anywhere from one to hundreds of hits. For web analytics, what this means is that to simply count the number of hitsis probably too simple of a measure as the number of hits does not disclose muchinformation about the effectiveness of a web site. To give a more accuraterepresentation of hits, web analytics can allow the results to be broken down intothe following groups: Total Hits, Page Hits, Downloads, Graphic Hits, Other Hits, andUnique Requests. By viewing the hits in this way allows for more useful informationto be disclosed. For example, consider the situation of a site for an art gallery. Onthis site users are allowed to download images of the art work for sale in the gallery.For this site the number of download hits could be a more important measure tofocus on than the other types of hits. Where with a site for a bookstore page hitsalong with unique requests may hold more importance.
Page Views and Bounce Rate
Page Views are very similar to hits. This is the measure that most peoplethink of when they think of a hit. A page view is defined as a successful load of adocument from the server by a visitor. A page view includes a number of differenttypes of documents. The document could be a web page (.html, .htm, .asp,.aspx, .php), document (.doc, .xls, .pdf), script files (.cgi, .pl), or plain text file (.txt). This does not typically include error pages or views made by robots. This does notmeasure the number of visitors to your site but can help to measure the popularityof a site (Jennifer Kyrnin, 2005). When looking at data for page views it is importantto consider not only total page views but also page views per visit. If a user is onlyviewing one page on the site and then leaving, this may not be what is wanted. Thebounce rate is defined as the percentage of visits with only one page view(Netminers). For a web site with several pages it is good to have a low bounce ratebecause that means people are looking at more than just the entry point for a site.However, having a high bounce rate is not necessarily bad. A blog, for instance,might have a very high bounce rate. With a blog visitors may only view the mostrecent post and leave once they have read the post and since the most recent postis usually on the first page, this site may have a very high bounce rate. In the
 
situation of a blog it is more important to look at number of visitors as opposed topage views and bounce rate.
User Data
Another factor that can be measured is data specific to the visitors of a site.An example of a good tool in measuring this is Google Analytics. Through this toolyou can receive a Visitors Overview report. This report measures the number of visits, number of unique visitors, new visits, and average time spent on the site. You can also view data based on location, language, operating system, browser,screen resolution, java support, and Flash support. A combination of thesemeasurements can help you to analyze the users that are visiting your site and howthey are using it. These analytics can all also be applied to all sorts of web sites.For a blog, measurements such as language and Flash support could be veryimportant measurements. For example, if the writer of a blog is based in an Englishspeaking country they would more than likely write their blog in English, however,most of the visitors to the site may end up coming from a different country. In thissituation the creator of the blog could add an option to translate the blog intoanother language to be able to better serve the visitors of the site.
Visits or Sessions
A visit is defined as a collection of documents viewed by a specific user(Jennifer Kyrnin, 2005). This section of user data can be easily related to the pagedata. In the Google Analytics visitors report data specific to the visits for a site isdisplayed. In this report the visits are broken down into absolute unique visitors,average page views, average time spent on the site, and new visits along with otherpage related data. Analyzing visits is important because it helps to show howindividual users interact with the site. If a goal of the site is to get users tocomplete a task on a specific page then by analyzing visit data it can be determinedif users are getting to the page frequently or if perhaps the page is beingoverlooked by most users. However, when viewing visit data to a site is importantto understand what exactly visits are measuring. Typically a visit is measured inincrements of twenty or thirty minutes. The problem with this comes when a visitorstarts browsing for ten minutes but then takes a forty-five minute phone call. Oncethe user has finished the phone call he or she then resumes browsing the site. Thisvisitor’s interaction with the site will then result in two distinct visits to the site eventhough the visitor never really left the site. Although this is not a major issue whenviewing the data it is important to keep that fact in mind when reviewing datarelated to the site (Jennifer Kyrnin, 2005).
Visitors
 The data related to the visitors of your site is important to having asuccessful site. Without the users the rest of the data would not even exist. Whenlooking for data to analyze related specifically to users the Google Analytics tool
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