Saturday 27 August 2011

Week four

Ok, so this week was the first week that we had no contact hours for e-business. I found it a little bit more difficult as I like the interaction of classes, but I think I am getting the hang of the online learning environment.

Below are the answers to the Google Analytics questions, these are based on Ian's Google Analytics portolio.

1.      Looking at the site usage, what does the term: visits, page views, and pages per visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean, and does it vary much from day to day?
Visits: The amount of times that the website has been visited by a particular computer. This could be many times in the one day, as one visit ends when the browser is closed (or inactive for a period of time), and therefore if the person starts another session in a new browser it is counted as a new ‘visit’.

Page views: This is a total view of all the pages in the site, and how many times each has been viewed.

Pages per visit: This is an average number of pages that a particular user views within their ‘visit’.

Bounce rate: This is the amount of people who have visited the site and then left before interacting (after only viewing the first page). It doesn’t seem to me that this percentage varies much from day to day. It generally sits between 25% and 50%, with some anomalies on either side. This 5min youtube video gives a deeper insight into bounce rates and what they mean across all of your pages (not just your home page). It also looks at your landing page bounce rate and what this says about your key word choices. 

2.      Now look at the traffic sources report. What are the three sources of traffic and where has most of the traffic come from?
·         Direct traffic (this is where most of the traffic has come from).
·         Search engines
·         Referring sites

3.      What was the popular web browser used to access the site?
Internet Explorer was the most popular browser. This information will be handy to know to assist in the set-up of the website. This is so that you can determine which browser you might want to optimise your site for.
4.      How many countries to visitors to foliospaces come from? What were the top four countries?
There were visitors from 130 countries to foliospaces. The top four countries were:
1.      Australia
2.      United States
3.      United Kingdom
4.      Canada
Interestingly enough, in the lowest countries (112 onwards), all but one of the visitors had a 100% bounce rate.

5.      Having clicked every possible link on my analytics, make a few comments on:
1.      What can you track?
Visitors (including new and unique visitors), bounce rate, countries, browsers, average time on site, page views and pages per visit, traffic sources.
2.      What can you track over time?
Increases and decreases in all of the above mentioned.
3.      What cant you track?
Specifics of a particular visitors’ eg. Loyalty and puchases.

6.       What to do the following terms mean?
1.       High bounce rate
High number of people who leave after visiting the first page
2.      Key words
The words people use to search and find the website
3.      Average page depth
This is the number of pages that a visitors views, during a session on a site.
4.      Click through rate
This is the amount of times that an advertisement is shown to users on a webpage, and is divided by the times that a user actually clicks onto the specific advertisement.
5.      Click
This is the amount of times that users click on a specific advertisement.
6.      Cookie
This is a thread of data stored on a computer. It allows the computer to be saved on a server, so that the computer gives information to the web server about the session or computer. For example if you are on a website, it remembers that you are logged in, so that you do not need to re-login when you visit different pages on that site.  
7.      Impression
This is when the web address, or your paid advertisement, is shown on a browser, eg. In a search result.
8.      Hyperlink
Highlighted text, that will link you a website, file or place within the page or document.
9.      Navigation
This describes the way that a user surfs the web.
10.  Page view
A user viewing a page.
11.  Session
The amount of time that a user spends interacting on a site.
12.  Unique visitors (or absolute unique visitors)
Those people who have come to the site to the very first time.
13.  URL
Uniform resource locator. This is an address where information is stored and can be found as it is unique to that information.
14.  Visitor
This term refers to the amount of people come to the site, as best as can be counted through google analytics. But it is tracked by computer, not person, so therefore might not be an exact amount of persons to the site, but is close as practically possible.
15.  Visitor session
A visitor session is a measured amount of time that the visitor (see above) interacts with a website.
16.  Comparison shopping
This is the act of shopping around to see who has the best product or deal.  


References
Google Analytics - Bounce rate: the simply powerful metric (2007, Sep 12) Retrieved from, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppgfjo6IIf4


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