Here at Allyte, we’re big supporters of local churches and non-profit organizations. This month, Allyte is giving away a website (through our new product, called Speak) and 1 year of hosting to one church or non-profit organization. Winner to be announced September 17, 2011.

Do you know a church or non-profit that could use a website facelift? Enter them in the giveaway here!

Read part 1 of “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” here.

Read part 2 of “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” here.

The last part of this 3-part series on understanding Google Analytics covers the last five pages of the sample report [download it here]. Let’s start with the map overlay.

The map overlay section is a breakdown of the countries your website’s traffic is coming from. In the sample report, the majority of the traffic came from the United States. The numbers that follow show the amount of visitors from each country, the average time they spent on the website, what percentage of the visitors were new, and their bounce rate. You’ll also see the comparison to last month in the sample report.

This information is somewhat helpful in understanding where traffic comes from, but a customized report that drills down to a more local level would be more beneficial. The report can be configured to show this data, but it isn’t configured in the default Google Analytics report, as demonstrated in the example.

The next section down is titled “Content Overview”. This is one of my favorite sections of the report because it shows the most popular pages for the website. There is also a term here that we haven’t defined yet – “Unique Views”. Google defines unique views as “pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.” [source]

For this site, the home page is the most frequently viewed page on the site, which I suspect will be the case for the majority of websites. The report shows the number of pageviews for each page down the list, and the percentage of total pageviews this number represents. It is also compared to the last month’s pageviews to contrast traffic to the previous month.

Lastly, the “New vs. Returning” section breaks down visitor types by numbers. As you can see in this sample report, new visitors outweight returning visitors by a margin of only 54. In the previous month, however, new visitors took the title. If goals are configured in your Google Analytics dashboard, these numbers will also appear here. Google has a great article about getting these setup for your Analytics account.

The sample report we used as an outline for this series of articles is the default report available from Google Analytics. Analytics users can configure customized reports that offer information that is helpful for their specific website. The online dashboard for Analytics allows for interactive reporting, drilling down through the site to display numbers that are helpful in determining how to optimize your website. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series. The information found in these reports needs to be interpreted for the purposes and goals of your website.

Thanks for reading through the series – and happy number crunching!

Read part 1 of the “How to Understand Google Analytics Reports” series here.

Your Google Analytics report contains great information about visitors to your website that can assist in optimizing your site for the end-user. Let’s jump straight in. If you downloaded the Google Analytics Sample Report, we’re looking at page 3, titled “Visitors Overview”.

Again, the report includes a line graph to visualize the visitor breakdown by day and a contrasting color comparison to the previous month. It’s very similar to the line graph on page 1.

Below this graph is the breakdown of visitors to the site with a comparison to the previous month. Much of this information is duplicated from the previous 2 pages, but I want to make a point about absolute unique visitors.

We defined “visits” in part 1 of this series, but the next statistic down is “absolute unique visitors”. Here’s the meaning of the term, as defined by Google:

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.

This represents, possibly more accurately, the number of devices that have accessed your device, rather than the actual number of people. It can be assumed that a single individual will access the same sites from a work computer as they would a home computer or mobile device. Each of these devices is registered as an “absolute unique visitor” according to Google’s definition.

Below this absolute unique visitors statistic is a summary of the usage of your site, most of which was outlined in Part 1 of this series.

Next down the line is the Technical Profile section. This is where you’ll find numbers about the internet browsers and connection speeds being used to access your site. This information is important because if most of your users are using Internet Explorer to access your website (and I suspect they are), you’ll need to test the website using Internet Explorer for compatibility and display issues. The connection speed can also have an impact on the end-user’s experience of your website. If most users are on a dial-up connection, a flash-intensive or graphics-heavy website is not going to offer a good user experience, and will likely cause your bounce rate to decrease.

The Traffic Sources Overview section of the report provides information about how people find your website. Google defines traffic sources in three ways:

1. Direct traffic – the visitor has typed your website address into the address bar of their browser.
2. Referring sites – the visitor clicked on a link from a third-party website to access yours.
3. Search engines – the visitor searched for a certain term or terms and found your website in the results.

The report even includes a nice little pie chart to visualize this data.

Below this visualization on the left side are the numbers for the most popular traffic sources for your site. Depending on how you want people to find your website, these numbers are helpful for optimizing the website’s performance on search engines or advertising platforms. If your only form of marketing is handing out business cards with the web address, then direct traffic may be your top source. On the other hand, if your website is real estate, you’ll probably want great results with search engines.

Speaking of search engines, the right side column of pages 5 and 6 are the search terms visitors have used to search and find your website. This information is helpful in determining if people are actually finding what they are searching for when they arrive at your website. For example, let’s say you own Pisa Pizza, an online retailer that sells pizza kits. The keywords you want to see in this list are “Pisa Pizza”, “pizza”, and “pizza kit”. If people aren’t finding your website through these search terms, it’s time to improve your website’s search engine optimization.

That’s it for part 2 of “How to Understand Google Analytics”. Part 3 will come later this week.

Google Analytics is one of the best website traffic tracking tools on the market. And it’s free, which makes it even better. If you have Google Analytics running on your site, at some point you’ll want to see a report related to the traffic on your site. The basic report that is produced for a certain period of time contains a ton of great information about your website traffic. Once you see this report, you may want an explanation of each section of the report. Here’s how to understand what you see.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics report of your own, Google Analytics Sample Report so you can follow along.

Pages 1 & 2 – The Dashboard

This page is a general overview of the report. At the top left, you’ll see the website domain name. At the top right, you’ll see the date range for this report. If you have comparison reporting turned on for this particular report, it will show the date range that is the comparison.

The most visually impacting element on the first page is the traffic bar line graph. This shows a day-by-day graph of the traffic on your site. In the sample you downloaded above, the current month’s traffic is in blue. the comparison month’s traffic is in green.

Site Traffic

Just below the traffic bar graph is the general site usage numbers.

Site Usage

There are some terms here that need to be defined. The full glossary of terms is available here, but below are some important terms for this post:

• Visits – “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. You can update this setting with an addition to our tracking code.” [source]
• 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.” [source]
  
  
• Pageviews – “Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. This can be an HTML or similar page with tracking code being loaded by a browser, or a call to _trackPageview() to simulate a pageview.” [source]

• Pages/Visit – The number of pages a visitor viewed in a single visit or session.
• 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.” [source]
• Average Time on Site – The amount of time a visitor remained on the site during a visit or session.
• New Visits/Visitor – “Google Analytics records a visitor as new when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used.” [source]
• Returning Visits/Visitor – “Google Analytics records a visitor as ‘returning’ when the _utma cookie for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.” [source]

You’ll also see a map overlay that is a visual representation of the geographical areas your visitors are coming from.

Near the bottom of the first page, you’ll see a traffic sources overview that is a pie chart of the ways people find your website. This is broken down into three types of traffic sources – search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc), direct traffic (typing your domain name into the web browser), and referring sites (clicking on a link from another website to yours).

Traffic Sources

On page two, you’ll see New vs. Returning visitor types. These terms are defined above. Next to this column, you’ll see content overview on the right side of page 2. This is a list of the most popular pages on your site during the report period, in descending order.

Now, how do you make sense of all this information?

This basic information is a good way to keep a thumb on how people are using your website. It indicates how long people stay with the site once they arrive. If the time spent on the site is very brief, it may be time to consider changing the content or navigation of the site to make it more appealing for people to stay on the site. If people find the site through direct traffic, but not through search engines, it may be worth the effort to invest some time in optimizing the website for search engines so the site can be indexed properly.

These numbers are indicators of how people interact with you online. If you have 2,000 visitors, but no contacts from those visitors, perhaps a better call to action or contact method should be in place. The numbers are great for tracking your progress and measuring success for your website.

Most importantly, the numbers outlined in the report will need to be interpreted for your organization. A non-profit organization will have different priorities for their website than a bluegrass band will have for theirs. When interpreting these numbers, you may be faced with the task of establishing goals and setting priorities for the website that are in line with the goals and priorities of your organization.

That covers the first section of the Google Analytics report. Any questions?

When Sequoyah Hills Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee was ready to upgrade their website, they wanted something that was visually attractive and easy to manage from anywhere. Allyte recommended a Joomla 1.5 CMS and left the design choice in their hands. In the end, the team chose a RocketTheme design because of its visual impact and feature set. Take a look at the final product below.

SequoyahChurch.org

I wrote about some photo resize tools not too long ago, but I learned of another tool you should know (and use!) through one of my favorite blogs. A reader also wrote to suggest another popular resource that I’d like to toss out there.

• Shrink Pic [via Lifehacker] is perhaps one of the most handy picture resizing tools when working with online mediums, such as websites and social media sites. It’s the most handy because you don’t have to think about it. ShrinkPic automatically resizes pictures you’re uploading to the web. This does a few things: 1) it decreases the amount of time it takes for your file to transfer, 2) it ensures you have an optimal (or close to it) size for web use, and 3) it conserves server storage space.Go ahead, install ShrinkPic. Your website administrator will love you for it.
• IrfanView is a very popular program that allows you to resize pictures and perform a ton of other operations on images (it even plays videos). It’s free for download at http://www.irfanview.com/, where you can also find a full list of features.

Adding pictures to a Joomla! article is really quite simple. Take a look at the video below to see how to do it.

How to Add a Picture to a Joomla! Article from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.

Take a look at this introductory overview of the Joomla! Control Panel. More videos will follow to cover each menu item in more detail.

Joomla Control Panel Overview from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.

The Joomla! Article Manager is one of the key elements of the Joomla! Content Management System. Take a look at the video here to see the basics of how to use it.

Joomla Article Manager Overview from Brandon Moore on Vimeo.