EmpowerYou
Helping entrepreneurs, professionals, and not-for-profits make the most of business technology!

September 2008 - Issue 25

In This Issue

How to start collecting visitor statistics?

Learn the website tracking jargon!

Hits versus Visitors

How to Measure your Websites Effectiveness

Quick Links

Google Analytics

Glossary

About EmpowerYou

Client List

Newsletter Archives

Greetings

Google Analytics is a free service Google offers to track, monitor and measure statistics relating to traffic, conversions, and page views on your web site.

Google Analytics tells you how your visitors found your site, how they interact with your site, how long they stay, and from what page they enter and leave.

Discover how profitable your keywords are across different search engines and multiple online campaigns. Identify where your best online customers come from and which target audiences are the most profitable for your specific content.

How to start collecting visitor statistics?

Open an account at Google Analytics if you don't already have one. Then get your webmaster to copy and paste the code provided by Google into the bottom of your content immediately before the </body> tag of each page you wish to track. If your website has a footer file used on all pages, copy and paste the tracking code into that file only.

Learn the website tracking jargon!

Here are a few examples:
Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. Cookies are used to determine when you are a return visitor.
Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. It is measured for each page.
Traffic Sources describe where your visitors come from: which search engine referred them to you or did the visitor come directly by typing your website's address in their browser? If traffic originated from a search engine, it tells you which keywords were used in the search. This is very important for search engine marketing.
Conversions: A conversion occurs when a visitor reaches a goal established by the marketer. This goal page could be a purchase confirmation page, a "thank you for registering" page, a download page, or an online presentation.
Here's a complete Google Analytics Glossary!

Hits Vs Visitors

In the 'old days', it was 'hits' - literally the total number of files sent to the visitor's browser by the server. Pages, graphics, everything. It soon became obvious that this was open to all kinds of manipulation: put five images on your page, and you could claim six hits each time someone visited the page. Boost your traffic overnight by adding a few more images to each page. This ultimately led to 'page views' - counting the pages themselves, not the individual elements. A 'pageview' is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.

How to Measure your Website's Effectiveness

One of the web's most attractive features for marketers is its measurability. Since the very earliest days, web servers have kept logs of files downloaded, users' IP addresses, referring sites, and even the software used by each visitor. All this gives visibility, and a depth to the data, which no other marketing channel can rival.

Leading market researchers Nielsen//NetRatings have come out in favour of time-based metrics:
Total Minutes spent at your website is the best engagement metric. However the only metric which really matters to a business is profitability. All the other web measurements can be useful in terms of tweaking your strategy, your message or your customer service.

If you would like to know more about Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, or just how to use the Internet to achieve your goals, call us!

Sincerely,

Ron Foreman
EmpowerYou
Helping entrepreneurs, professionals, and not-for-profits make the most of business technology!
647-999-8543
Empower You