Understanding Web Analytics

Web analytics is the collecting, analysis, and reporting of user activity on a web site. Just as the people running television networks want to know who is watching what, web site owners want to know how many people are visiting their site, how long they’re staying for, and who those people are.

An understanding of basic web analytics terms and technologies is vital to anyone with a web site today. Web analytics is like many technology topics and has its own unique vocabulary. In order to learn what you need to know about your own site and its performance, you need to cut through the web analytics jargon.

Hit

A web site receives a “hit” whenever the web server driving it receives a request for a file. The file might be a web page, an image, or a style sheet–any type of file at all which the server makes available.

In the early days of the world wide web, hits were used almost exclusively to measure a site’s popularity. In web analytics today, it has been largely replaced by other statistics.

Page View

Whenever a hit results from a request for a page–such as an HTML, ASP, or PHP file–it’s considered a “page view.”

Page views has almost completely replaced hits as one of the most important measures in web analytics, because page views more accurately reflects how much actual content has been delivered to users.

Visitor

Sometimes called a “unique user” or a “unique visitor,” a visitor is, in theory, a unique person using their web browser to look at a site. In practice, it can be difficult for web analytics software to provide an accurate count of how many people looked at a site.

The number of visitors a site receives is the closest thing web analytics has to the number of real people using a web site. When site owners want to know how popular their sites are, this is the number they usually turn to.

Visit

Also called a “session,” a visit starts with the first request from a visitor and ends when the server receives no more requests from that visitor for some amount of time, usually around 30 minutes.

Because visitors frequently return to web sites they like, the number of visits a popular site receives is usually much larger than the number of visitors.

Visit Duration

Also called “session duration,” this is the approximate amount of time a visitor spent looking at the site.

Like the number of visitors a site receives, it can be difficult to determine just how long a visit lasted for. Still, site owners use a site’s average visit duration as a rough measure of how appealing a site is to its users.

New Visitor

A visitor the web analytics software hasn’t seen previously. Ideally, this is a new person who has just found the site.

How users discover a site is often very important to that site’s owner. Did they click on an advertisement for the site? Did they use a search engine? By tracking the activity of new visitors, web analytics tools can answer these questions and many others.

Returning Visitor

A visitor who has been to the site before. A high percentage of repeat visitors usually means a site is appealing to its users. With so many sites on the internet, a poor site isn’t likely to see a lot of repeat business.

Impression

An “impression” is whenever an advertisement appears on a page. It’s similar to page views, but for ads. Most ads are sold based on the number of impressions it will receive, so having an accurate measurement of this number is critical if you are buying or selling online advertising.

Single Page Visit

A visit which resulted in only one page being viewed. For example, if a visitor looks at a site’s front page, then uses his or her back button to go somewhere else, that would be a single page visit.

Single page visits are usually the result of someone taking a brief look at a site and deciding to go elsewhere. This might mean he or she didn’t like the site, but it also might mean the user found what he or she was looking for right away.

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of a site’s visits which are single page visits. The higher this number, the more visitors looked at the site and left quickly.

A bounce rate of less than 30 percent is considered very good, while a bounce rate over 60 percent is usually a sign that a site may not be giving visitors what they want.