Analytics & Optimization

If you are upgrading an existing site, or creating a brand new one, analyzing your traffic is essential to optimizing your desired outcome. We will work help you analyze website and optimize it for maximum results.

Free Online Evaluation Tools:

Competitors demographic and traffic stats.
Alexa.com
Quantcast.com
MOZ http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Whoisology.com (Search To Find Domain owner by URL or email).

 

Competitors AdWord Campaigns & Keywords.
SpyFu.com  Webinar with SpyFu’s Dave Fiske.
iSpionage.com

Grade your website.

woorank.com

marketing.grader.com

Web Analytics Tools

Woopra.com (Create Free Account)
Clicky.com (Easy alternative to Google Analytics)
ScreamingFrog (SEO Spider Tool)
WhyNoPadlock.com (Resolve issues w/ SLL)
CloudFlare.com (SuperCharge your site)

Find Key Performance Indicators (KPI) by Industry

Blogs:

blog.iSpionage.com
moz.com/blog
MattCutts.com/blog

Website Magazine: SEO 101

marketing-300

 

Google Analytics: Terms & Definitions

Search Engine Results Page

The term “hit” usually applies to the contents of web server log files. With Google Analytics, a hit is ANY call to the Google Analytics data collection system for a pageview, event, custom variable, measurement protocol upload, etc.

A pageview is recorded every time a page is viewed. More specifically, a pageview is recorded every time the Google Analytics pageview tracking method is executed. When a visitor hits the back button, a pageview is recorded. When a visitor hits refresh, a pageview is recorded. Every time a page is opened in the browser, regardless of whether it has been cached, a pageview is recorded. (Of course this assumes the tracking code is being used.)

A visit consists of a series of pageviews that a single visitor makes during a period of activity. A visit ends after the visitor either closes the browser, clears cookies, or is inactive for 30 minutes. (The timeout length is customizable in the tracking code settings)

Visitors are defined by a unique ID – this ID is usually stored in a visitor’s cookies. Whenever the tracking code is executed, it looks for cookies on the browser set by the current domain. If they can’t be found, new cookies with a new ID are set. Google Analytics emphasizes visits over visitors because of the inherent inaccuracies of trying to track individual users. For example, a visitor who deletes their cookies, uses multiple browsers or shares their computer will show up inaccurately.

A visit with one pageview. It doesn’t matter how long the visitor was on the page or how they left. Technically, it’s a visit with only one interaction.

Time on page is measured by subtracting the time a visitor hit a page from the time they hit the next page. (e.g. If they hit Page 1 at 12:00 and hit Page 2 at 12:03, time on Page 1 is three minutes.) This means that the time on page for the last page in a visit is always zero because Google Analytics doesn’t track pages being closed.

This is the sum of the time on page for all pageviews in a visit. Or, more accurately, it is the difference between the time they viewed the first page and last page in a visit. Note that viewing pages in different tabs doesn’t affect this. Google Analytics simply sees a string of pages being viewed in chronological order, without any reference to multiple tabs or windows.

A visitor who did not have Google Analytics cookies when they hit the first page in this visit. If a visitor deletes their cookies and comes back to the site, the visitor will be counted as a new visitor.

A visitor with existing Google Analytics cookies from a previous visit.

A measurement of how influential a page is to conversion. The higher the number, the more frequently it was viewed prior to a purchase or conversion. It’s calculated by taking the goal conversion value or transaction value of a visit and applying it evenly to all the pages prior to that conversion. Seen in aggregate, it just attempts to correlate pages to conversions.

Pageviews divided by visits. This metric shows the average number of pages viewed per visit.

Ideally, this is the traffic that came to a site via bookmarks or by directly typing in the URL. In reality, it is the traffic for which the code couldn’t determine a source. Depending on the site and the browser, some links may not show a referrer and instead would be categorized as direct. Using campaign variables will get around this misrepresentation every time.

This is traffic for which (1) a referrer was identified, (2) the referrer is not a search engine and (3) there are no campaign variables. The referring URL (a.k.a. the page that contains the link to your website) is also stored for referrals.

Google Analytics automatically categorizes traffic as coming from a search engine if the referring URL is from its list of known search engines and there is a search term identified in that URL. Both organic and paid search engine traffic is put into this group.

A feature that allows you to track visitor activities separately from pageviews. This is commonly used to track interaction with AJAX or Flash content.

The API extracts data from Google Analytics accounts. It allows customers to programmatically extract Google Analytics data and incorporate it with 3rd party applications and/or databases.  Learn more at http://analytics.angelfishstats.com