The Need for Analytics

You can’t run a successful site without utilizing the power of web analytics. Without being able to see how your website is performing or learning more about the people visiting your site, you’re throwing away a huge opportunity.

You need to developed a strategy to funnel visitors from entry pages all the way to the page where they can make a purchase, or whatever you need them to do. This goal of having visitors do something you want on your site is commonly referred to as a conversion. If visitors weren’t making it to your conversion page, you need to make some minor adjustments to increase sales!

You can use your analytics tool to see if you’re achieving your goals. Make the necessary corrections based on your observations, and keep doing this until you achieve ultimate success. If you don’t set proper goals and progress toward those goals by using web analytics, you’re throwing money away.

It is important to understand the difference between a hit and a visit, and the even bigger difference between a visit and a conversion. A hit is generally defined as a server request for each item on a specific web page. This includes images, animations, and downloads as well as any components that page uses (style sheets, JavaScript files, or rollover images).

Opening one page of your website can result in many hits, so it’s not very productive or accurate to use the word “hits” when thinking about the amount of traffic to their site. The number of visitors and/or visits is a much better choice.

A visit is defined as a person who lands on a page of your website. They may navigate to other pages and eventually leave, but the whole process is counted as one visit. This form of measurement makes more sense because you can report how many visitors you had to your Web site.

You can also track different types of visits: new visitors and returning visitors. This lets you analyze how many “new” visitors you have compared to those who are returning for another visit.

Most importantly, conversions represent the number of visitors to your website who completed a pre-defined goal or action. If you sell something on your website, then conversions is defined as the number of visitors who made a purchase. If your aim is to build an email list, then the number of people who fill out an information box is your number of conversions.

You can also break visits down into parts to learn more about visitor behavior. During each visit, you can see how many pages of your site were viewed and how much time the visitor spent on them. You want visitors to land at your site and stay as long as possible, visiting as many pages as possible. With the correct analytics program, you can see which pages the visitor looked at and in what order, as well as which pages held their attention the longest.

Tomorrow – Analytics Part Two