What the Numbers Tell You
Not every analytics program calculates each number with the same formula. However, it helps to have a general idea of what the numbers mean. Read on for a definition of several common measurements.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your Web site (within five seconds). Avinash Kaushik, author of the most popular Web analytics blog and the book Web Analytics an Hour a Day says this number is a great place to start making sense of the data.
In his blog, Kaushik suggests looking at the bounce rate for each site where the traffic originates, and reevaluating relationships with the sites sending poor quality traffic. Also, look at the bounce rate for different keywords. You can get rid of the ones that turn up uninterested visitors and optimize the ones that get results.
Hit
A hit is a request for a file from the Web server. There can be several hits per page view. If a page has three images, for example, four hits will be registered — one of the page and one for each image.
Page View
A page view is a request to load a single Web page on a Web site. Page views can help you determine which pages are the most and least popular on your Web site.
Unique Visitors
This metric is an estimation of how many individuals visited your Web site. It counts a visitor once within a set period of time by identifying the visitor with a unique number assigned to his or her computer.
The metric has some limitations. It is almost impossible to measure because the same person can visit your site from two different computers or two different visitors can use the same computer.
Request
This is a message sent from the Internet browser to a server asking for information.
Visit/Session
A visit, which is also called a session, is the sum of a visitor's requests from the time he or she enters the Web site to a set end time. This information can be very useful in analyzing the paths visitors take through your Web site.
You can relate it back to conversions by finding out how many sessions it takes for a single visitor to convert. Often people research and take several days to make a purchasing decision. |
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