Posts Tagged maryville

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.