As with any tool, website statistics can be helpful or harmful depending on how they are wielded.
At BrownBoots, our developers install code for Google Analytics for all the websites we build as a matter of course. We encourage our clients to keep an eye on their websites’ traffic and make adjustments and/or additions based on of their findings. And we also routinely monitor the stats so that we can make recommendations to improve the user experience.
Jumping into analytics is a little like being handed a Swiss army knife with a plethora of unfamiliar and confusing parts to unfold. If you don’t know what a specific tool is for, you’re probably not going to bother with it. Or, worse, you’ll make an assumption about its purpose, and maybe your reactions will do more harm than good.
While we’re happy to work with clients to better understand the capabilities of Google Analytics — and the sometimes-esoteric terms it uses — here are some of the basics, using actual data from the BrownBoots’ website, specifically the staff bio pages.
No egos were harmed in the writing of this blog post…
(Click image for a larger view.)
Pageviews
“Pageviews,” logically, refers to the number of times a page has been viewed by a human visitor. (Google filters out any traffic from “webcrawlers” or “bots” — those programs that scan pages to populate search engines’ results pages.)
Out of all of the staff bio pages, Jenny’s (/jenny-knuth.html) received the most visits … a full 21 more hits than Scott’s.
Unique Pageviews
Of course, a person can visit the same page over again, thus boosting the rank of any given page. “Unique pageviews,” on the other hand, counts each individual visitor only once during the selected time span. That’s why unique pageviews are always less than or equal to the total pageviews.
Looking at the BrownBoots bio pages, we see that while Jenny had 21 more pageviews than Scott, she had only 9 more unique visitors. And, in fact, Scott had fewer actual eyeballs on his page than Alan, who received 38 unique pageviews to Scott’s 37.
Average Time on Page
The term is self-explanatory, but what might not be immediately evident is why knowing the average time spent on a page would be useful. Generally speaking, the longer a person has a page up, the more use he/she got out of it. Conversely, if someone spends only a few seconds on a page, that person might not have found what he/she was initially looking for — or, for that matter, found what was there to be helpful or interesting.
Back to our example: Jenny received more pageviews and more unique pageviews than Scott, but people spent more time, on average, looking at Scott’s page. Of course, it wasn’t significantly more time, so it could just come down to more content (e.g., words to read) on his page.
Bounce Rate
Maple Bacon, official BrownBoots greeter
The percentage of visitors who land on a page from somewhere outside the site and immediately leave the site determines the bounce rate. If someone comes to a page from a search engine and realizes he/she is not where he/she expected to be, that can cause the bounce rate to spike. It also could mean that the individual found what he/she was looking for and didn’t need to click around the site in search of more information. In general, however, lower bounce rates are preferred.
Which is bad news for some members of the BrownBoots team, particularly those who scored a 100 percent bounce rate. Amazingly, our greeter dog Maple achieved a 0 percent bounce rate. We can only assume that once people saw her pretty face, they realized our website had value and continued to look around.
Percent Exit
The “% Exit” column goes one step further than “Bounce Rate” and tells what percentage of all visits to a given page — whether from elsewhere on the site or from a different website entirely — resulted in an immediate departure from the site.
BrownBoots employees whose bio pages have lower “% Exit” numbers like to tease those with a higher number that once visitors saw the other person’s photos, they quickly closed their browsers out of fear or disgust.
This screen shot only scrapes the surface of what Google Analytics — and other web statistics programs — are capable of. If nothing else, though, anyone should be able to see the value of their site’s content by comparing how many people visit each page and how long they spend there.
There’s a lot that can be learned. For instance, I predict that the number of pageviews on all of our staff bio pages will go up after this blog post is published.
And thanks to Google Analytics, I can easily find out if I’m right.
