WEBSITE ANALYTICS

Ehi Binitie
University of Georgia,
MIST 7500
10/15/2009
CONTENTS

I INTRODUCTION ................................................................ 1

II WEB SITE STATISTICS...................................................... 1

III TYPES OF ANALYTIC TOOLS ........................................... 3

IV GOOGLE ANALYTICS ........................................................ 0

V CHAPTER NAME, OR MAIN IDEA 4 ................................. 0

VI CHAPTER NAME, OR MAIN IDEA 5 ................................. 0

VII SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................... 0

2
 INTRODUCTION

A website is a fantastic way of publishing information to the world.

With all the effort used to create a site, you would of course want to
have some information about your audience. From what countries do
they hail? What information did they seek? What content held their
attention?
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and
reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and
optimizing web usage1.
In most cases web analytics involves measuring a visitors browsing
habits on your website but it can also be used to monitor web sites
other than your own. Tracking the competition, monitoring
advertisement campaigns or just keeping up with the buzz on a web
site are all reasons to use off-site analytic tools.
Most of this paper will be about on-site analytics. This refers to
monitoring data about your own web site. The next few sections will
explain this further.

WEBSITE STATISTICS

There are various important statistics that you need to track on your
website. The basic terminologies are described below.
Hits
This is the retrieval of any particular item from a web server. This could
include all types of files such as jpegs, PDF files, HTML files, Java
Scripts, flash videos. It is not a true indicator of traffic to that web site.
For example, a page is downloaded and it contains four JPEGS, two
JAVASCRIPT files, one MP3, one M4V and one flash file. The total
number of hits would be ten. Nine site objects and the page itself.
Monitoring hits is more of an indicator of the number of files
downloaded by a user or how much bandwidth was used. The more
files a user has to download, the longer it takes for the page to appear.
Page Views
To get a better perspective of your website statistics you should track
the page views. Page views are the number of times a page is
downloaded. A single page view is counted as the request to load a
single page of a web site. Only the page is counted rather than the
contents of the page. A lot of advertisers use page views to determine

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what pages they would like to place their advertisements on.
Page View Duration
This is the amount of time a visitor spends on a particular page of a
web site. It is a good indication of whether the content was engaging
enough to keep the users attention or if they simply left the page as
soon as they go there.
User Session
To monitor a particular user’s activity while on a site, you use track
user sessions. This is recorded when someone with a unique address
visits or re-visits a website. Sessions last for a set timeframe such as
half an hour, and if a visitor re-enters after that timeframe another
user session is recorded.
A user session can be made up of multiple page views and is a better
overall indication of user activity. If a user is browsing a web site and
stops to take a call that lasts for an hour and then comes back to
continue browsing the same web site, it would be counted as a new
user session.
Page Depth
Page Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes
before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing total number of
page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views
per Session or PV/Session. The more pages a user views on a site the
more “sticky” the web site is as the user will have longer sessions and
more interaction with the web site.
Visitors
A visit is an interaction, by an individual, with a web site consisting of
one or more requests for an analyst-definable unit of content (i.e.
“page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically
additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the
visit session will terminate. Visitors to a web site are tracked by IP
address a unique identifier for each computer.
Unique visitors
Unique visitors are the number of inferred individual people (filtered
for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with
activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is
counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting
period. A unique visitor count is always associated with a time period
(most often day, week, or month), and it is a “non-additive” metric.
This means that unique visitors cannot be added together over time,
over page views, or over groups of content, because one visitor can
view multiple pages or make multiple visits in the time frame studied.

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Their activity will be over-represented unless they are de-duplicated.
New Visitor
This is a visitor that has not made any previous visits to the site. This
definition creates a certain amount of confusion and is sometimes
substituted with analysis of first visits.
Repeat Visitor
This is a visitor that has made at least one previous visit to the site.
The period between the last and current visit is called “visitor recency”
and is measured in days.
Frequency
Frequency measures how often visitors come to a website. It is
calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the
total number of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure the
loyalty of your audience.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which
the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. You can use
this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally
indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The
more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your
site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing
pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should
provide the information and services that were promised in the ad
copy.

OTHER IMPORTANT STATISTICS OFTEN USED BY ADVERTISERS

Additional information that could be tracked but that is more useful for
advertisers feedback includes:
Impressions - The number of times an advertisement is displayed on
a web page. Advertisers often pay per impression, which mean every
time a banner ad is displayed a fee would be paid to the website
owner.
Clicks - Refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from
one page in a site to another. This is now a more commonly used
method for paying for advertisement as traffic is actually sent to the
advertisers web site and a higher fee is usually charged for this than a
mere impression.
Click path- The sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors
follows on a given site. Tracking the flow of a visitor from one click to
another can give vital information about the user’s browsing habits.

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 WEB SITE ANALYTIC TOOLS

With all the different statistics that can be gathered about website
users the big question is how to capture and view the information.
There are various analytic tools available to monitor web site statistics.
Websites write to web logs and the data written to those logs can be
mined for detail information about the website’s visitors.
Analytic tools generally fall into two categories:
• Log analytic tools- meaning they browse through your web site
logs to report website statistics,
• Page tagging analytic tools- a piece of code has to be
included on each page to be tracked on the web server. Every
time the page is requested, information is sent back to the
analytic tool along with other pertinent information about the
user.
In few cases web analytic tools may combine both solutions. In the
next section we will review these different types of analytic tools.

Log Analytic Tools

Log analytic tools mine your web server's log files for statistical
information. Most of these tools present the information in a nice to
read graphical format. Log Analytic tools usually reside on your server.
Depending on your choice of tool you can get very detailed information
about your visitors browsing habits. Some of the advantages of Log
Analytic tools over page tagging are that you do not have to modify
your site code to track these site statistics, the web server normally
already produces log files, so the raw data is already available. Also
you are not locked into any proprietary format as the data remains on
your servers. Information on spiders and bots are also captured in web
logs which is useful for search engine optimization. This information
gives details on what the search engine crawlers are looking for. Log
files contain information on every call that it makes to the web server
even calls for pdf files that cannot normally be done through page
tagging as javascript cannot be included in such files.
The downfall is that you are responsible for setting up the software
which does require a bit more technical knowledge.

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Listing of some Log Analytic tools2
123 Log Commercial Analyzer
Analyzer
Absolute Log Commercial product with a Windows program
analyzer
Access Watch Complete site monitor.
Advanced Log Commercial product available as a CGI or Windows application
Analyzer
AlterWind Log Free "lite" version available
Analyzer
Analog Calls itself the most popular log analyzer in the world
AWFFull Intended to improve upon Webalizer
AWStats Up to date free, open source analyzer
BrowserCounter A cute little perl script that gives you a detailed list of your users' browsers. Very simple.
Deep log Windows based commerical product
analyzer
Geo Log Pretty maps
Analyzer
http analyze Another classic piece of software. Very popular and and very basic.
httpdstats Light analyzer for Apache
JXLA Java log analyzer outputs XML
LogMiner Intended to improve upon Webalizer
Net Tracker Flashy and expensive piece of software
Nihuou Log Commercial analyzer
Analyzer
Nosy Parker Tags personal data to IP addresses
OpenWebScope Visitors and site structure
Polliwog A java based log analyzer
Relax A perl based analyzer with extensive referer stats
Sawmill A product with an excellent interface to a deep analysis of your logs.
Stone Steps Another Webalizer fork
Webalizer
Visitors Web analyzer with usage patterns analysis
Web Log Desktop based analyzer for Windows
Storming
Webalizer Another veteran log analyzer.
Webalizer A fork of the Webalizer
Xtended
WebLog Expert Available in free and demo versions
WhosOn Commercial product emphasizes "live" stats
Wusage Classic analysis tool. Has been around a long time.
wwwstat This is the classic log analysis tool. A perl script.

Page Tagging Analytic Tools

With page tagging analytic tools, a piece of Java Script code is added
to each page. This Java Script code includes an invisible image and
other pertinent information that is sent to the analytics software to
record the users browsing habits. The piece of code also sets cookies
on the browser to uniquely identify the visitor.
Some of the advantages of Page tagging analytic tool s over log based
ones are3:
• Easier to install,
• Not a lot of technical expertise needed to get started.
• No issues with cached pages not being captured as part of your

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 statistics as in the case of log based analytic tools.
• Statistics are gathered again even if the page is cached.
• The page tagging service manages the process of assigning
cookies to visitors; with logfile analysis, the server has to be
configured to do this.

Commercial Products Free version available/ Self Hosted

• 3DLiveStats - Commercial product. Visually • Google Analytics - Previously

appealing 3d views. Urchin Software Corporation and
• AuriQ – Commercial product based out of Adaptive Path. Now Google.
Japan, also has mobile web analytics • Mint- Self-hosted web analytics
tracking. software.
• Clicktracks – Leading web analytics • Piwik- Downloadable, open source
software solution. Acquired by Lyris web analytics software program.
• Clicky - Real time web analytics. Targeted to Project lead by OpenX.
blogs. Has iPhone web app to view data on • Woopra- Nice Web tracking and
the go. analysis application. Currently free
• Coremetrics - Leading provider of online while in beta mode.
marketing and business optimization • Jawstats - is a free, open-source
solutions. website statistics and analytics
• CrazyEgg – Commerical Web analytics package. It runs in conjunction
software that provides visuals (heatmaps, with AWStats and produces clear
etc). and informative charts, graphs
• Etracker - Web analytics combined with and tables about your website
visitor voice (opinions of vistors) visitors.
• FireClick - Web analytics software vendor.
• Yahoo Web Analytics- Previously
Owned by Digital River
IndexTools. Acquired by Yahoo.
• Hitmatic- Commericial Web analytics
software.
• HitsLink- Commercial Web analytics
software offered by Net Applications.
• Intellitracker- Commerical Web analytics,
behavioural profiling, customer
segmentation and business intelligence
software vendor.
• Kampyle- Customer feedback analytics
vendor.
• Nedstat- Dutch based web analytics
software vendor.
• Omniture- Commerical marketing and web
analytics software suite vendor.
• RealTracker- Dutch-based web analytics
software vendor.
• SageMetrics- Leading provider of
behavioral targeting solutions, leveraging its
extensive experience as a web analytics
provider to deliver superior, proven
technology and service.
• Visionalist- Web analytics software vendor.
Owned by Digital Forest.
• Unica- Enterprise marketing management
software vendor.
• Xiti- French based web analytics software
vendor.
• SiteClarity- Product of CheetahMail, a
global leader in online marketing solutions.
• Tealeaf- Customer behavior analysis
software vendor.
• Webtrends- Online marketing and web
analytics software suite vendor

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 Mobile Site Analytics Competitor Analytics
• Bango – Mobile web analytics. • Alexa.
• Comscore
• Hitwise
• Quantcast

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

With this list of exhaustive tools there are lot of options to choose from.
It is important to note that no web analytic tool will be 100% correct.
Website Analytics software should be used to monitor trends on your
web site. I decided to review a few from both lists on my blog web site
and social networking web site.
Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used Web Analytic
tools. It is free and provides reliable information about your web site.

Google Analytic Features4:

Advanced Segmentation
Google analytics gives you the ability to analyze subsets of your web
site traffic. You can select from predefined custom segments or create
new customer segments with the tools segment builder. These
segments can be compared side by side in reports.
Custom Reports
As mentioned above you can create custom reports to show your
analytic data the way you like. With an easy drag and drop interface
you can easily created reports and sub reports about your web site
statistics.
Dashboards
Customizable dashboards enable you to bring the functionality you
want to the home page of your account to make it easier to find the
data you need.
API and developer platform
This gives you the ability to customize Google Analytics with Google
APIs available on Google Code.
Date range slider
Google analytics provides an easy to use interface to compare time
periods and select dates.
Multiline graphing
Easily plot mulitiple points on graphs for faster analysis of your web
site statistics.

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Data Export
Share your statistics by exporting into PDF, Excel, CSV and tab
delimited files.
Email reports
With Google Analytics you can schedule or send instant report emails
that contain the statistics data you would like to share.
Sophisticated administrator and user controls
Set admin or regular user permissions to control how sensitive data is
shared and which reports are available to users on your account.
Motion Charts
Google Analytics provides sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to
most reports.
Geo Targeting
See where most of your visitors are coming from around the world.
Funnels
See what pages lose your traffic and where these customers go.
Score cards
See your site metrics in context of historical or average site data.
1st party cookies
Google Analytics uses 1st party cookies to ensure reliable tracking and
protect visitor privacy.

Screenshots of Google Analytics on ehibinitie.com

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 WEB SITE ATTRACTIVENESS

A few ways to make your blog attractive include:

1. Use an eye catching title to capture the attention of the reader.
2. Use an appealing post beginning and post end.
The opening paragraph is the second most important part of
the blog post. Sometimes we create a killer post title but fail to
compensate it with equally great opening, resulting in bounce
back. Your reader's anticipation and imagination must be
fulfilled after he lands on your post following the attractive
post title. There are various approaches to open a post and you
can use choose the best approach depending on the need and
situation5.
You could do this by:
a. asking a question,
b. using a metaphor or an analogy,
c. starting with eye-popping statistics,
d. saying something controversial.
3. Use lists to present information as it displays information quickly
with easy access.
4. Use pictures

USE POWER OF LISTS

Collection of resources in the form of bulleted lists is one of the best methods to make post more attractive
and sticky for readers. Visitors love bullet lists that give quick and easy access to tons of information. If
there is scope, do not hesitate to create a list to increase the stickiness of blog post.

USE POWER OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Picture speaks a thousand words. Spice up the blog post with relevant images to make the reading
experience more interesting and fulfilling for the visitor. Use of images can make even a dull post look
attractive to the reader.

WEED OUT USELESS JARGON

Sometimes, newbies use filler content to pack empty places in the post. Nowadays there is tons of similar
content on web and visitors tend to skip posts containing useless stuff. Trim and weed out all junk
information and condense the post into meaty useful information pack. That's what the reader is looking
for. Clear and crisp, to the point and easily understandable information.

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STRESS MORE ON QUALITY NOT QUANTITY

Creating a very long post should be avoided in most cases. With the emergence of social media sites, a
large chunk of blog traffic comes through these sites. Studies have shown that the traffic from these sites
have comparatively higher bounce rate then that coming through organic sources, and retaining the
visitors coming from these sites is a challenging task. Readers are looking for quick answers to their
questions. They have no time to read a mini-novel for a small problem. Try to keep the posts short (300-
500 words) and simple. Avoid narrating a story and elaborate the problem in minimum words.

SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION

Now this point is quite obvious. A blog post free of any grammatical and punctuation error is the key to
better reader experience. As soon as you finish the post, don't be in a hurry to press the publish button.
Devote some time in proofreading, editing and correcting all the mistakes. Once you are satisfied, publish
it on a test blog. Now open the post as a visitor and read it carefully. This way you can pick up many more
shortcomings and errors that you may have missed earlier. Repeat this process until you are not
completely satisfied.

MINIMUM ADS

Aggressively stuffing ads in and around post body is a sure shot way to repel the visitors. Place the ads
carefully and if possible keep the content part completely free of any ads. Avoid embedding graphical ads
in the main content. Blended text ads at the end of post body are a good choice.

HAVE YOUR SAY!

What other methods you use to make blog posts sticky? According to you what is the best way to make the
post more luring to the reader?

the industry focused on making a involves not only creating a site that
is visually appealing to human eyes but also to the eyes of search
engines and content readers. To attract visitors to your web site, it
should be designed carefully to attract the target audience and also
have engaging content to keep their attention and having them
returning over and over again. It also has to be search engine friendly
hence the need for Search Engine Optimization techniques to make
sure your site is very attractive to search engines and to give you the
best site rankings.

SEO Techniques

Content

Marketing

is not only a design concept but also a usability and Once you have

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begun to monitor web site activity you will of course want to think of
ways to improve the traffic to your web site. Making your web site
attractive which means not only design wise but sticky and interesting
to visitors is a good way of improving the traffic on your web site. The
first steps is making sure you have all the required information needed
by search engines to find your web site.
HubSpot
Websiteoptimization.com
Meta tags, keywords and seo techniques are important to getting your
site noticed. Modifying content according to your web site analysis can
also increase your web site attractiveness as content that is hardly
accessed can be moved to the background and the more important
pages that users search for can be highlighted. Tools that check your
web site for seo techniques inclue. Making your dymanic pages static
are ways to improve your search engine visibility. Rather than
displaying the same page name with the parameter variables, you can
convert these pages to static pages so that the titles of your pages are
actually included as new pages on the search engines increasing your
visibility.
Other things you can do improve site visibility includes adding social
networking features and integrating facebook, twitter etc.

text of your term paper begins here. The sample footnotes are written
in the Modern Language Association (MLA) style. Make sure that you
use the footnote and bibliography style preferred by your instructor,
and that both types of reference use the same style guidelines.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Referenced sources are cited below.

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1
webanalyticsassociation.org
2
counterguide.com

3
wikipedia.com
4
googleanalytics.com
5
mintblogger.com