The World Through My Eyes

Welcome to the first in hopefully a series of posts in this ‘for n00bs’ section

First of all, a brief introduction this post is aimed at those of you who are just getting to grips with Analytics, you have a vague idea of what everything means. What I aim to do is explain how you can apply GA’s analysis to your website.

First, let’s cover what each statistic means…

Visits and Pageviews are pretty straight forward.

Pages/visit - This is the pageviews divided by visits.
Bounce Rate - This shows how many visitors came to your website and went away without viewing any more pages (i.e. they only looked at the first page they saw and went away after that).

Average Time on Site and % New Visits are also self explanatory so let’s now look at how each of these should influence decisions you make as the webmaster…or administrator of the website.

1. Visits
This is the number of people visiting your website. There are various sources of visitors (or traffic): Search Engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Live Search etc.); Referring Websites (i.e. websites that link to yours) and finally, direct links (when someone types your URL directly into the adress bar on your browser).

For most smallish sites, their biggest chunk of traffic is likely to come from referring websites, for example for my website, I’ve had almost three quarters of my traffic from other websites.

What should I do if I want to get more visitors?
You’ve got to advertise your website and drive traffic to it. There are many ways, I recommend you hang around some SEO and Web Development forums (e.g. www.digitalpoint.com). I also recommend this article by John Chow as a good summary.

Generally, the more traffic/visitors you get, the more pageviews you’ll get as well - we’ll get to this soon.

2. Pages/Visit
This is how many pages, on average, each visitor looks at. If this is low, there are a number of reasons…

- You need more content
- Your content lacks quality
- Website Navigation/Design needs to be improved

In a nutshell - people aren’t really liking much of what they see - so they leave. One important point though is that this figure depends a lot on the source of your traffic. If you’ve got links from website with similar content to yours, visitors are more likely to be interested in your content and so will view more pages per visit. On the other hand, if you advertise a lot on directories - your traffic won’t be targetted so visitors will view fewer pages per visit.

3. Bounce Rate
This shows the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave having only seen one page (i.e. the page they entered your website on). There’s no set reasonable bounce rate - it varies depending on the content of your website and the landing page among other factors.

Again, the best way to reduce your bounce rate is to provide content that will tempt your visitors and draw them in. Another alternative is to break your article up, into 2 or more pages - this way the visitor will have to click a link to view the next part of the article. The same techniques should increase the time spent on your website, on average, by each visitor.

4. % New Visits
The percentage of visitors who are visiting your website for the first time. Once again, no surprise here but if the percentage is over around 75% or so then you need more high quality content to increase return visitors to your website.

Another method is to build up a mailing list to keep past visitors informed about the latest happenings on your website. RSS feeds are also very useful - if visitors like what they see, they’ll come back - good news for you!

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So, there we go. Hopefully, you’ve got a much clearer idea of how to use statistics Analytics generates. I’ve covered everything I can think of, but if there’s something I’ve missed or if you have any more queries, drop me a comment!

For more tutorials like this, click onto a great new blogger community forum - www.bloggertoblogger.com

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