1) Looking at the site usage, what doe the terms visits, page views and pages/visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean and does it vary much from day to day?
Visit – A period of interaction between a visitor's browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time. For the purpose of Google Analytics reports, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=33073
Page views – The number of requests to view a specific web page in a specific time frame.
http://totheweb.com/learning_center/seo_glossary.html
Pages/visit – The number of pages the average visit generates. This is an average number.
Bounce rate - Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139826
The Bounce rate for this particular site does vary a great deal from day to day. It ranges from 33.33% to 100%, with an average of 70.57%. There is no pattern consistency in the percentage of bounces from day to day.
2) Now look at the traffic sources report. What are the three sources of traffic and where has most of the traffic come from?
The three sources of traffic for the 350 visits are:
Search Engines – 288 (76.57%)
Direct Traffic – 68 (19.43%)
Referring Sites – 14 (4.00%)
Not surprisingly the most amount of traffic has come from the search engines. For smaller more unknown sites most people go straight to search engines to find what they are looking for. It is quick and convenient.
3) What was the most popular web browser used to access the site?
The most popular browser used to access the site is Internet Explorer. Accounting for 239 visits (68.29%).
4) How many countries did visitors to OZRURAL come from and what were the top three countries?
The 350 visits to Ozrural came from 24 Countries/Territories. The highest three visiting Countries/Territories were Australia (240 visits), United States (52) and United Kingdom (18).
5) Having clicked every possible link on my analytics, make a few comments on:
(a) What you can track
Google Analytics gives you the ability to track most things you would require in order to understand the visitors to your site. Although it does not say what you are necessarily doing right or wrong in blatant terms. It does give you the stats you require in order to improve your webpage. Over time it will show you in specific areas what works and what does not. Some of these stats include:
Visitor Trends – number of visitors, bounce rate, time spent on website, number of absolute unique visitors, pageviews, and average pageviews.
Browser Capabilities – browser type, operating system, browser and OS, java support, flash version, screen resolution, screen colors.
Visitor Loyalty – depth of visit, length of visit, recency, loyalty.
Network Properties – hostnames, connection speeds, network locations.
(b) What you can track over time
You can track most of the items listed above through a 12 month average stats graph and through more specific time related charts and graphs.
(c) What you can’t track.
It can’t directly track whether the users like your website or not. It can be shown indirectly through loyalty, although you may be the only site providing the service.
It does not show you which visits were converted into sales.
Difficulty the users had in finding your website, e.g. the users may have had to use many different search engines to find your website.
6) What do the following terms mean? These are just a few, you may like to add some more and perhaps include them on the Moodle glossary.
High bounce rate - A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986
Key words - A significant word or phrase, relevant to the web page or document in question. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the internet.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33035
Average Page Depth - The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32974
Clickthrough rate - The number of times an ad is clicked on, divided by the number of impressions it receives. For example, if an ad is shown 20 times and receives 3 clicks, the clickthrough rate is 3/20, or 15%.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32982
Click - 'Click' refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another. For example, the 'Clicks' display in the Site Overlay report shows how many times a user clicked a hyperlink on the selected page to travel to another page.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32981
Cookie - A small amount of text data given to a web browser by a web server. The data is stored on a user's hard drive and is returned to the specific web server each time the browser requests a page from that server.
Cookies are used to remember information from page to page and visit to visit, and can contain information such as user preferences or shopping cart contents, and can note whether a user has logged in so that they do not need to authenticate again as they navigate through the site.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32989
Impression - A display of a referral link or advertisement on a web page.
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33030
Hyperlink - A text reference in a web page that, when clicked, directs the user's browser to another page or document. Hyperlinks are integral to the World Wide Web, allowing every page to be linked to any other page.
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33347
Navigation - Describes the movement of a user through a website or other application interface. This term also indicates the system of available links and buttons that the user can use to navigate through the website.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33042
Pageview - A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33050
Session - A period of interaction between a visitor's browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33073
Unique Visitors (or Absolute Unique Visitors) - Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33087
URL - is a means of identifying an exact location on the Internet. RLs typically have four parts: protocol type (HTTP), host domain name (www.google.com), directory path (/analytics/), and file name (conversionuniversity.html).
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33084
Visitor - 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, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33094
Visitor Session - A Visitor Session is a defined period of interaction between a Visitor (both unique and untrackable visitor types) and a website.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33095
Comparison shopping – Where the purchaser will compare on the basis of price and quality before a purchase is made.
http://www.eastrenfrewshire.gov.uk/written_statement-glossary
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