Web analysis terms

For those of you who are watching me struggle to get up to speed with web site stuff, let me report a new breakthrough. As I mentioned earlier, I have set up with Google Analytics for the 4 sites I am developing. It was interesting (but of no special importance) to see from what countries visitors came in the last week or so (when I started getting data). But some of the BIG statistics had no meaning. So I looked them up in Google and here are the (mostly Wikipedia) meanings:

Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of people who arrive at any of my pages and never go to any other of my pages from there. Either they came by mistake or else, having arrived, they decided nothing else was interesting enough to click on. I learn that 50% is generally considered good–only one in two stays around.

Landing Page: a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement (I can safely ignore this since I have no advertising and do not need to get anyone to do a transaction or make a conversion–convert a viewer to a buyer).

SEO (Search engine optimization): improving the visibility of a website through adjustments to the contents or invisible header information. The earlier and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive. I have heard of people measuring how far down the list their page comes in response to a search. I almost never search beyond the thirrd set of 10 ‘hits’ unless I am desperate and can’t come up with a way to narrow the search. The word seems to be that playing games to fool the search engine can backfire. The best strategy is to post what people are looking for.

Unique Visitor: a uniquely identified person viewing pages within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor’s computer, not the person, usually via cookie. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers or with two different browsers will count as two Unique Visitors.

Repeat Visitor: A visitor that has made at least one previous visit in the time period

New Visitor: A visitor that has not made any previous visits (in the time period?).

Apparently visitor categorizing relies on ‘cookies’ which I viewed as an evil violation of privacy, but folks who delete them regularly show up as lots of new visitors!

Does all this really matter to me? Not really. I hope to find folks who share my interests and want to interact on a regular basis. I don’t have anything to sell yet–probably not for at least a year when some books get finished. My first site, C and the 8051, took about 6 months (about a decade ago) before it even appeared on search engines, but now it seems to plod along OK. Other than paying at least $100 a month from the start, there was no way back then to get noticed quickly. Now, for free, I seem to have shown up almost immediately.

The only useful thing I can see from analytics is the indication of how many people visit and how many stick around to read stuff on other pages.

C & 8051: bounce rate 67% and 76 visits
sailing: bounce rate 47% and 15 visits
revisiting scripture: bounce rate 32% and 31 visits
this site: bounce rate 13% and 31 visits

The first site has lots of visits but most visitors go on to something else immediately (do I need to revise that page?) Sailing only has 15 visits (but I’m not focused there yet). The site on scripture has a very good bounce rate but it hasn’t attracted many visits yet (I don’t thing there is anything I can do but keep posting and look for like-minded sites to share links.) Finally this site has a marvelous bounce rate, but still few visits (I’m not sure what to do except keep posting and perhaps link to writers’ pages).