This is the process of collection, measurement and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website. Analytics play a crucial role in any online business for their ability to monitor visitors as they pass through and interact with a website, without them it is difficult to make informed decisions based on user’s feedback, in this case that feedback is navigation paths, conversions and click through rates.
<!– Start of Google Analytics Code –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.”
: “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost +
“google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-26676-4″); pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();</script>
<!– End of Google Analytics Code –>
This is an example of the tracking code that runs on each and every page of the website to enable Google to track user’s movements. Note: The user must have Javascript enabled to run this code.
This shows an overview of the traffic on Swansea.info for the period 1st September 2008 until 1st October 2008. The traffic does fluctuate quite a lot day by day but there is a reasonably consistent trend over the time period.
It also reports on Visits (9319), Page Views (24,239), Page views per user visit (2.60), Bounce Rate (58.42% and is how many times a visitors lands on a page and leave straight away without looking at another page on the website.
A recent article by (Dainow, 2008) says “Google Analytics should not count a bounce as a visit”. But that is how a lot of people use web sites: they enter a specific search in to Google and hit each item of the search results in turn. Just because people do not go beyond the entry page does not mean it is not a useful visit. Maybe the author is focused on conversion-funded rather than ad-funded sites. Omniture’s HBX analytics counts bounces as visits and it is fair for Google Analytics to do the same. That said, he is right about Google Analytics artificially deflated visit-time stats. Google counts a bounce as a visit of zero-seconds duration and includes it when calculating average visit duration. Omniture HBX simply ignores bounces in the visit duration calculation. This means HBXs average visit time is always higher (and more sensible) than Google’s – especially where the bounce percentage is high.
It also reports on the average amount of time a user spends looking at the content (1minute 37 seconds) and also what percentage of the traffic are new visitors in this case 78.91% will not have seen the site previously in the reported period.
