If you’re not familiar with the term web analytics or don’t know your site’s basic numbers then you’re not getting the most out of your website.  

Web Analytics as defined by Wikipedia is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.  Read the complete Wikipedia entry on web analytics here. 

Getting a grasp on how many visitors you have, how they get there, and what they’re doing or not doing on the site is critical to getting the most from your web presence.

There are many quick and easy tools to help gather and make sense of this information, but first you must know some basic terminology (definitions provided by Google):

A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website's perspective. 

Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.

A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser. Every time a visitor goes to a web page it is considered a pageview.

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Typically the lower the bounce rate the better.  Think of it this way - an interested visitor will view more than one page.

Visit Google’s full analytics glossary here.

Basic web analytics tools help you…

• Determine how many people are visiting your website, what times of day and days of week are the most popular.
• Determine how long visitors are spending on the site and how many pages they are viewing.
• Determine where your visitors are located.  Most analytics tools can identify user’s locations down to country and even city level.
• Determine how much traffic is coming from search engines, which search engine and what search terms they are using to find you.
• Identify the most popular and the weakest content on your site.  Most site administrators are surprised to learn what content visitors value the most.
• More advanced tools provide much more detailed information.  Some even allow the site administrator to follow, in real-time, a website visitors actions.

With this data you can confidently make additions and adjustments to your website that visitors will value.  It makes tracking the performance of an online marketing campaign or topic section within a website very easy.

Properly used, web analytics will increase the performance and value of your website.  The best thing is, it’s very easy and intuitive to set up, interpret and use web analytics to make informed, accurate web marketing decisions.

For more information on how Google Analytics can help your organization, please contact Gray Web Technology + Design at 210-820-0566 or email us at info@graywebtech.com.

Google Analytics clearly shows number of visitors, pageviews, average time a visitor spent on the site, the bounce rate, dates and times of visits and much more.

You can drill down to get detailed information or back out for a dashboard snap-shot view.

Google Analytics determines the worldwide location of your visitors, down to the city. You can narrow the reports by country, state/province or city.

These are just some of the many features built into Google analytics. For a full listing visit Google Analytics' website