Archive for category wordpress
Give a Free Website to Your Favorite Church or Non-profit!
Posted by admin in church, Company & Product Profiles, Email, Free Stuff, fun, Internet, joomla, mobile, news, productivity, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications, Website Development, wordpress on September 1, 2011
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.
How to Understand Google Analytics – Part 3 of 3
Posted by admin in Company & Product Profiles, Email, File and Data Sharing, google docs, how to, Instruction, Internet, joomla, mobile, news, productivity, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications, Website Development, wordpress on June 9, 2011
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!
How to Understand Google Analytics Reports – Part 2 of 3
Posted by brandon in Company & Product Profiles, File and Data Sharing, Free Stuff, google docs, how to, Instruction, Internet, joomla, productivity, Security, Simplicity, Technology & Gadgets, Timesavers, tips, Tools, Tricks & Hacks, Web, Web Applications, Website Development, wordpress on June 7, 2011
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:
- Direct traffic – the visitor has typed your website address into the address bar of their browser.
- Referring sites – the visitor clicked on a link from a third-party website to access yours.
- 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.
All Church Camp Websites
This week is All Church Camp in rural Helena, Arkansas. On the agenda this week is teaching a group of 12 teens how to develop a website using WordPress. A few pictures have been posted on Twitter – via @robmcbryde and @brandon_moore.
Here are the websites they’ve been building: