Trending Upward

If we’re going to talk about web analytics, at some point, we’ll need to explain exactly what metrics we are using. For instance, what is the difference between a page view, a visit, and a unique visitor? What does bounce rate really mean? What’s the difference between bounce rate and exit ratio? Why do I care about any of this?

The Web Analytics Association Standards Committee put together the Web Analytics Definitions document last year that defines every metric you can think of for measuring user performance on your site. So why am I bothering to go through some of them now when you can just read the document? Although the document does explain some metrics within context, I’d like to further explain some interesting nuances.

For the sake of time, I will only define four (of the arguably most popular) metrics in this post. There are so many others out there, but for now we’ll stick to these.

Page View. Defined technically, it’s the number of times a page is viewed. You may be saying to yourself, “well, duh!” but this metric can be confusing, especially if your site is a blog, AJAX or flash-based.

First let’s talk about blogs. Depending on the way your blog is set up, your entire post (when published) may publish to the front page. So, if you look in your analytics, you’ll get a thousand page views for your homepage page, and then, say, 10 for your actual post page. Why? Because users can read an entire post on the homepage. So how do you know which posts users are reading? An easy way to figure this out is to implement the “read more” excerpt functionality within your blogging platform. Users will view an exerpt on your homepage, then be forced to actually click and view your post page to read the rest. There you go – micro-conversion!

Flash and AJAX present problems as well. Traditionally analytics tools allowed you to “fake” page views within the action script in Flash, but, of course, this is clunky (and can take a ton of time). Google Analytics now has event logging, which allow website owners to track Flash and AJAX easier. So, for those people who think you can’t track flash or AJAX-based sites, that’s not true. And, to top it off, it’s getting easier.

Visit. A visit (also called a session – these terms are interchangeable), is an interaction by a user consisting of one or more page views for a specified time period. Usually (for most analytics tools by default), the time period is 30 minutes. So, a user comes to your site and views some pages. The session/visit ends when the user:

1. exits out of the site or browser
2. is idle for more than 30 minutes

This, again, gets a little tricky with Flash and AJAX for the reasons specified above. Analytics tools are getting better with these types of pages/sites, though.

Unique Visitors. A unique visitor is always counted according to a time frame. There are daily unique visitors, weekly unique visitors, monthly and so on. A unique visitor is a user that visits your website one or more times within a specified period. Unique visitors can be tracked using authentication or a persistent cookie. A persistent cookie, as opposed to a session cookie (which expires when you close the session or visit), is a cookie that is put onto your computer and expires only after a specified period of time (usually 365 days). Unique visitors can easily be skewed by users deleting their cookies or denying third party cookies (cookies deserve an entire post!).

So … a weekly unique visitor would be one user (who accepts cookies and does not delete them within that week) who visits your site one or more times within that week.

<PostEdit> – Kyle brought up a great point. Unique visitors is always specific to the report you’re look at. If you’re looking at a monthly report, then the visitors are unique over that month time. If you change the time frame to a week report, then the unique visitor count will change accordingly. </PostEdit>

Bounce Rate. Specifically defined as single page visits/entry pages. A bounce can only happen when a user enters a site on a specific page and leaves the site without ever viewing other pages. Sometimes people get this confused with exit rate or ratio (which is number of exits from a page/total number of page views of that same page).

It’s very important to put bounce rate into context. For instance, the two most popular links on the World Campus current students page are off-site URLs. That means, if our current students have bookmarked that page and use it as a portal to these other sites, that page will have a very high bounce rate. In this context, that’s ok. If a specific page on your site has a high bounce rate, be sure to try and figure out why. It may be for a perfectly good reason.

<PostEdit> – Another good point about bounce rate from Kyle. Remember that a bounce rate is always an exit rate, but an exit rate is not always a bounce rate. Bounce rates are a subset of exit rate specifically for first page (or entry page) visitors. </PostEdit>

My goal with this post was not to bore you (although you’re probably arguing to the contrary right now!). It’s important that we have standard definitions of our metrics. It’s as important to put these all into context when analyzing and reporting.

Next week … breaking down each type of site. The helpdesk, the Intranet, the school or department website. How can analytics help these specific types of sites?

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