Monitoring Your Website through Analytics

While it’s necessary to track your online marketing efforts’ progress, it’s also important that you know how web analytics work. It starts with knowing the commonly used terms and their meaning. That way, you’ll know what components that you’ll need and measure.

Unique Visitors

Usually defined by a user agent and IP address, Unique Visitor refers to a person who visited your site within a pre-defined timeframe. Your site’s timeframe can either be daily, weekly or monthly. Therefore, if you set your timeframe in a weekly basis and a user visited your site twice this week, he or she will be counted as one unique visitor only.

Visit or User Session

Also called as “session,” visit or user session deals with the number of web documents viewed by a user in a given period of time. This analytics component gives you an insight on how a visitor, defined by a user agent and IP address, wandered on your website.

It is typically measured by the amount of clicks within 30 minutes, regardless if you left the site or not. For example, you visited a site and made a few clicks. Suddenly, you have to take a phone call that lasted for 35 minutes. That would be considered as one session already. If you didn’t make any interaction on the website for 30 minutes, it will be considered that you already left the site.

Page Views

Page Views is defined as the user’s successful loading of a web document. Thus, it doesn’t include images, CSS, sound and video file views; error pages and page views by robots. It is basically used to know the popularity of a particular web page, although it doesn’t represent the number of people who visited your site.

Hits

The term “hits” is probably the most used and misused word related to web analytics. Wikipedia defines it as “any request for a file from a Web server.” This means that an image download and a CSS of JavaScript request can be counted as a hit. However, this doesn’t tell much useful information—unless you are a Web server administrator. This factor only indicates why a page takes a while to load.

It’s important to understand what each analytics component means. That way, you’ll know which data you need to measure for a particular purpose. Furthermore, this will familiarize you with measuring your content’s performance, and whether it’s providing the return on investment that you’re looking for.

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