Learning how our web site works is an important task. We've seen some simple examples in previous steps (visits, page views, and unique visitors) as well as determining how long someone visited your site, and which was the last page they viewed. We've shown how some pages are viewed more than others, and where people exit your web site. We've even shown what pages people come to your web site. What we will look at now is how did they get to your web site. Before they were on your web site, … [Read more...]
posted on January 28, 2008 by
Watch out for those scams
From time to time different clients call me up to ask me about something that comes across their desk. Most of the time their gut instinct had it right, and they were looking at a scam. Sometimes the scam is legal, just immoral - like charging $100 a year for a domain name when it can cost under $10. Or they are charging $200 for submitting your site to Google every month for a year, when in reality, you can do it yourself for free. By the way, over submitting to Google or the other search … [Read more...]
posted on January 25, 2008 by
More Metrics – What Pages are Seen (First)
Learning how our web site works is an important task. We've seen some simple examples in previous steps (visits, page views, and unique visitors) as well as determining how long someone visited your site, and which was the last page they viewed.Most of these metrics were simple to user, and that is fine. However, now we want to look at the flip-side of which pages people leave on, that is what pages they are viewing, and which ones do they view first. This is which pages people go to first, … [Read more...]
posted on January 24, 2008 by
Be careful with your text ads
You should always be careful when posting your ads. A quick look might have caught this one. It unfortunately doesn't do their business any good, but it does hurt their click-through rates. While it is common to hear people talk about doing things wrong quickly, hopefully they hear the other have which is to learn and fix just as quickly. … [Read more...]
posted on January 19, 2008 by
What does a spike in bounce rate mean?
Well it depends. We had started to set up on a Friday the analytics for a large existing site. We know that several key areas are used more than others, and some of the pages rarely get seen. While in the past articles I've not gone into how do you set up your application, this is a key element of the process. Without good (enough) data, you can never make good decisions on your web site. Site configuration is often the first place to look. The first few days was busy trying to get the data … [Read more...]
posted on January 18, 2008 by
bounce rate survey
The day after I post a simple overview explaining what a bounce rate is, I find an article where someone who specializes in web analytics has posted a survey to find out what different people's bounce rate is for their site. I can tell you that the different sites I manage range from about 8-12% (Corporate Intranet) to 55-60% (this blog) - blogs generally run higher, because they have several articles on a page, so you don't have to follow pages to get content. I give a range only because … [Read more...]
posted on January 17, 2008 by
More Metrics – exit pages and bounce rate
Learning how our web site works is an important task. We've seen some simple examples in previous steps (visits, page views, and unique visitors) and we've seen some data that gets calculated (average page views and time on site). While these were simple, and often given on the front page of your reports, I want to look at two related pieces of information that are not always so prevalent: exit pages and bounce rate. The Exit Page is an easy metric to understand. This is generally a list … [Read more...]
posted on January 13, 2008 by
Revamped Site
As many of you may know, because I talk about it often, in addition to working in the Internet industry, I also like to teach about it. Well the term just started, and I wanted to do a redesign of the site. I usually have a different site for each of the colleges I've taught at. For example I used to teach at a local for-profit school called IADT. Now I am teaching at a local community college, Seminole Community College and I have a separate site for them. You will often hear about me … [Read more...]
posted on January 6, 2008 by
More Metrics – Pages per Visit and Time on Site
Learning how our web site works is an important task. Learning how to properly measure it is even more so. We have to look at not only the data, but we also need to know what questions to ask when looking at the data to put it into the correct perspective.There are a couple of "obvious" measurements mentioned in the last article (visits, page views, and unique visitors). While that information is often raw data, and easy to display, we will now look at some data which most systems will … [Read more...]
posted on January 1, 2008 by
How effective is your web site
Learning how our web site works is an important task, which is often measured incorrectly. We have to look at not only the data, but we also need to know what questions to ask when looking at the data to put it into the correct perspective. Without understanding how the data works, we can run into all types of problems by drawing the wrong conclusions. In this section, I assume that we will be looking at data from some source such as Google Analytics and we are wanting people to purchase … [Read more...]