Trionia

So we have Google analytics (or any analytics for that matter) running on our website and we look at the reports and what the …?  What are all these new words?  Analytics, like many fields, has a unique vocabulary for describing the various measures and metrics.  And again like most fields, knowing the definitions gets you a long way towards understanding what you are looking at.  So for your viewing pleasure we have the following definitions:

Visits

A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. So for a user who visits at 11:00 AM and then again at 11:20 this user counts as a single unique visit; if the user clicks on a new page at 11:35 it now counts as two visits.  (Some analytics packages use the term session in place of visit.)

Unique Visitors

A unique user who accesses a Website, while people cannot be identified by analytics, we substitute computers.  So a single computer that accesses a website is deemed to be a Unique Visitor.  (Most analytics tools use cookies, small files saved by a browser, to determine if a machine has been to a website before.  Since many users, estimated to be 30% or so, remove cookies on a monthly basis, unique visitors can be overstated.)

New Visitors

A visitor that has not made any previous visits.  Since New Visitors are also determined by the use of cookies saved on a visitors computer; visitors that delete cookies will appear as new visitors.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.  (In general a higher bounce rate is not a good sign – but some websites are designed for a single page view before leaving, for example blogs.  Use bounce rate to analyze your site based on your site’s users goals.)

Average Pages per Visit

The average number of page views a visitor views before ending their visit. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of visits.

Average Time on Site

Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. (This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs cannot measure the length of the last page view, since the time is measured by start time of second page minus the start time of the first page.)

Page Views

A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging.  In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.

These definitions are from two primary sources Wikipedia and Google.  Another source of definitions is from IAB – the guidelines for banner sizes is quite useful, but the analytics definitions have been left behind by recent advances.

One great feature is the ability to set user goals in Google Analytics – like everywhere else on our website we are trying to answer the following questions:

• Are we providing what are users are looking for?
• Is it easy for them to find this information?
• When they find it are they able to complete the steps to find the information?

Let’s take a concrete example to make this more realistic – suppose we have a lead generation form where we would like individuals to enter in their contact information.  Within your website this might be implemented as a series of pages; such as an entry form and a thank you page.  Maybe there is even an optional registration page along the way.  So would you be able to view the numbers of people that sign up using this form every month?  Yes and goals is the perfect way to track this – not only will you get the number of sign ups, you will also see how many people started the process on the entry form and how many completed – this gives you some very useful information about how effective your sign pages are.

Setting Goals in Google Analytics

So how do we set this up in Google Analytics?  It is easy following these steps:

At the initial profile page in Google Analytics click on the ‘Edit’ button.

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Next you will see the Goals section of the Profile Setting page – click on the ‘Add goal’ link.  (You will see that there are four sets of goals with five goals provide for each profile – for a total of 20 goals.)

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On the Goal Setting page you can enter in all the information required to create a goal.  This information includes:

• Goal Name – use a descriptive name here, ‘Seminar Request’ is better than ‘goal 42′.
• Active Goal – used to turn a goal on and off.
• Goal Position – a helpful way to keep related goals together.
• Goal Type – Allows you to setup different types of goals, for our example we are looking at URL Destination goals.

Assuming a ‘URL Destination’ goal the next entry information is the Goal Detail section with these fields:

• Match Type – There are several different types available, Exact is useful for sites with static URLs.  Head Match is good when the beginning portion of the URL stays constant but trailing items, such as a query string can vary.  Finally Regular Expression match is good when the both the head and trailing URL can vary.  For our example we will be using Head Match.
• Goal URL – the URL for the goal.  The protocol and domain information does not have to be included.  So http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html can instead be shown as ‘thankyou.html’.
• Case Sensitive - set this if the URL will match with the exact case for all characters.
• Goal Value – This is useful for assigning a numerical value to your goals.  This can be especially helpful when each lead, sale or other goal can be assigned a monetary value.  (For example 10 leads result in a single sale worth $10,000, means each lead is worth $1,000.)

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One additional feature that is useful is viewing all the steps leading up to completing the goal.  In our example we had an entry form, optional registration form and then our thank you page.  To track the progress of our users through these steps we would create a goal funnel.

The page to do this is show here:

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Each step of the website leading to the Goal URL can be entered in this area with the URL (again use the trailing portion of the URL – omitting the protocol “http://” and the domain).  You should also supply a descriptive name for each step of the Goal Funnel.

Once your goal is in place you can start to really dive into what is driving your customers to complete any given goal.  You can also look at what has led them to the goal as well – search engines, referrals or direct traffic.  With this information you can really focus on helping your customers accomplish their goals and ideally boost your organizations goals as well!