How to Interpret Web Statistics

It has become significantly easier over the past five years for a company or other organization to establish a presence on the Internet, to the point that the average consumer simply assumes that a business will be online. Whether an organization is using a free web hosting service or paying a webmaster, it is important to understand what occurs when consumers arrive at an organization's website. There are numerous methods and software packages available to track incoming traffic and help make advertising and marketing decisions. Website analytics tell you what consumers are doing when on the website as well as where they go after they leave the web site. This article shows how to interpret web statistics using the freely available Google Analytics tool.

Things You'll Need

• A website that you have editing permissions or ready access to a web-master with editing permission.
• Internet Access

Instructions

1. Determine what questionsrequire answers using web statistics. Common questions include:
   How many visitors has the site received daily, monthly and annually?
   What is the source of the website visitors?
   What keywords did visitors use to visit the site?
   What pages on the website did the guests view?
   Did the website visitors buy or convert on advertisements on the website?
   The basic statistics used to answer these questions are:
   Visitors and Page views
   Page Counts
   Entry and Exit Pages
   Referrals
   Search Phrases
   Other statistics.

2. Register the website through Google Analytics, which provides free website analytic tools and data to the consumer. Once registered, Google will provide a short javascript snippet to include before the </body> tag on the target website for analysis. Note the javascript will need to be included on each webpage on the site to be analyzed.

3. Login to the Google Analytics website and select the Analytics Dashboard by selecting "View Reports" to view high level statistics on the website being tracked.

4. View the overall website traffic graphical view at the top of the web page for an overall view on the trend analysis of the amount of traffic the website is receiving.

5. View and analyze the Site Usage statistics. On the dashboard, Google provides the number of unique website visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on the website and percentage of new site visits. Each data category allows the webmaster (or site owner) to select the metric to drill down further into additional information on the visitors.

6. View and analyze the Site Map overlay. This function of Google Analytics allows the user to see where the users of the website are geographically located in the world. This tool can further be used when planning website content in order to geographically tailor the material to the target audience.

7. View and analyze the Content Overview, which provides a web page by web page analysis to help determine what content is being viewed from what source, which can further be used to determine follow-up site content and modifications to increase traffic.

8. 

   Select the Traffic Sources analytic. The sub menu on the left side of the screen allows the site owner or webmaster to view the referring sites, search engines, traffic sources, keywords and ad-words that led the users to the website. This information can then be used to further tweak the website content using search engine pptimization techniques.

9. Once you have the basics completed for Google Analytics, consider using advanced features the Google provides to set traffic goals and tools for assisting with these.

Tips & Warnings

• If you are new to analyzing web page statistics, use Google Analytics initially. As your site operations become more complex, you may want to consider paying for a statistical or analytical service based on your needs. If Google is not showing that the target website is being analyzed after loading the javascript to the web page, verify that the javascript was inserted before the </body> tag of the web page.

• No amount of statistical analysis will make up for poorly optimized or badly written content! Save a backup of your website before modifying the HTML code with javascript to prevent significant re-work in the event you make an error in editing.

Resources

• Google Analytics information
• Google Analytics Case Studies
• University of Rhode Island web statistics infromation