Who visits your website?

There are two types of people who visit your website

• Either they are your friends and relatives who are just keeping you motivated and visiting your website 
• or they are unknown people who don’t know you, but landed on your website in search of content you have posted on the website

Internet being so vast with ~2.3billion users around the world there are multiple channels through which the number of visitors to your website can increase. Let’s start listing the channel’s and see what you can do to promote your website later in detail

Following are the main traffic sources to any website.

• Direct 

• Typed: Visitors who directly come to the website by typing URL into the browser. Most of these people are your loyal customers who know you well and believe in you

• Bookmarked: Visitors who have bookmarked the website and use the bookmark to visit the website every time, again a very loyal set of customers

•  Referrers 

•  Internal Affiliate: Visitors who come to your website through an Independent web page created by you, but which is not a part of your website. These are also called as microsites

•  External Affiliates: Visitors who come to your website from an external website which is being hosted by an external partner to promote your website contents. These external partners are not doing social service, they have to be paid. 

• Aggregators: Visitors who land on your website through an external website which would be hosted by some external company. These companies’ aggregate similar products from various companies and host it on their website. They would provide extra functionality to visitors like comparison between similar products from two different vendors.  Simple example – creditcards.com

• Search Engines  

• Organic search: Organic traffic are the visitors who search for a product or content on the search engines (google, bing, yahoo etc) and click one of the innumerable results. 

•  Inorganic or Paid Search: Inorganic or paid traffic are the visitors who search for a product or content on search engines (google, bing, yahoo etc) and click on paid search results. The paid search results are the ones that get listed on top of the search results and are listed in a color background.  

• Others 

 

•  Display: These are the visitors who land on your website from your paid ad campaigns. On this page of india-forums.com you can see two paid ads one by facebook and the second one by somany on the right side of the page.

 

•  Social Media: Visitors, who come to your website from your social media publicity i.e. facebook pages, twitter tweets etc.

These are the top traffic sources for any website. Each of this is a profession in itself. People who would have expertise in all these channels are probably very few in this whole world.

Web Analytics Terminology

Literature is a very important skill to be mastered by an analyst - Say the right things, at the right time with right effectiveness and all the biggies are going to fall in love with you. 

But to make biggies understand what you say, you have to speak their language - the language of digital world. So, this post is all about the key terms i.e. metrics and dimensions of the web world

This is the castle of Web Analytics and Let's start with the Foundation

Pages – Consider website as a book, so whatever shows on your screen is a page. Just like the book is made of multiple pages, a website is made of multiple pages too. To turn a page, you click on the links. 

These are the different pages of the website www.india-forums.com

Page Views – Number of Times a page was viewed on the website. Even as you read this post, the page view count for this page has been incremented by one. 

Look to the right section of this blog and you will see something like this. 

 

This is the page view counter keeping a count of how many times my website pages were viewed.

Visits/Sessions – Visits and sessions are interchangeably used terms. Visit/Session starts the moment a person enters a website and ends at the end of 30mins of inactivity.

A little trick here - Keep your website open and either you stay at your computer and navigate on some other website(keeping this website idle) or just take a 30minute coffee break and come back. On 30^th minute 1^st second your presence on the website is counted as your second session. You don't have to close the browser window for your next session to start !!!!

On the contrary, if you close your browser and come back to the same website before you complete your 30minute inactivity, you will still be counted as the same visit/session. How? Remember the Cookie (Have you ever explored your cookies?), it is going to say the analytics engine, 30minutes are not over yet use the same session ID.

 

Visitor – Every person who visits the website is a visitor. Now that you are reading this blog, my visitor count has incremented by one. Also, if you are reading my blogs for the first time, you are a New Visitor and if you have already read my blog previously you are a Return Visitor.

These were the foundational metrics. After making our foundation strong let’s erect some pillars.

Landing Page – Any page that you land on that belongs to a particular website is your Landing Page. 

This need not be the home page always. Many of your search results do not take you to the home page, so which ever page it takes you can be called a Landing Page. 

Here my Google result click on 'Telly Buzz' takes me to the Telly Buzz page(Landing page) of india-forums which is not the home page of that website. 

 

  

Exit Page – The last page you view on the website. This could be any page of the website including the home page or the Landing page.

Referrer – Referrer is the page or the website from which you came to the current page/website. The referrer page can belong to the same website or some external website or search engine.  In the above picture, my referrer was Google.com

Visit Duration – Time you spent on the website. Calculation = timestamp of last session activity minus timestamp of first session activity.

Page Views per visit – As the name suggests, it’s the number of times a page was viewed in a certain reporting time period divided by number of Visits in the same reporting Time period. 

Click-Through – A simple metric. Number of times a link was clicked by visitor. 

  

                Click Through Rate (CTR) – Number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that page was viewed. 

This is what tells you, how good did your online campaign promotion happen. Lower CTR means, everyone just ignored your campaign right in your face. Higher CTR need not always be good, it is good only when people go ahead and buy your product (Conversion)

So, these were the pillars which will help you understand what your visitors do on your website and also will make your roof stand in place and the roof will save your company from calamities. 

Here is what the roof of a web analytics castle is made-of and if you do not keep a check on these roof metrics then its not very long before your company will go down into rags.

  

Bounces – Single Page Views on a website is called a bounce. You don't want this to be high.

For Example, you are on some xyz website reading important stuff and by mistake you click on an ad showing some random apparel, it will open the apparel website. You get irritated for your unwanted click and close the window that means you just bounced off the apparel website.

 

Bounce Rate –   Bounces or Single Page View visits divided by total visits to that page. You don't want this to be high. If it is high on every page of your website, then your website SUCKS!!! 

Conversion – Bliss!!! This is what every company loves the most. Conversions are the number of people who completed a targeted action.  The targeted action could be buying a product online or just becoming a member of a website or creating an online account. At the end of the day, its all about selling your product.

Click Density – If you have done all possible simple tweaking on your website, then you can finally choose Click Density to make your website more user friendly.

We know that a website has multiple pages, every page has multiple sections, and every section has multiple links and images. 

So, what do visitors click the most and what is just lying waste on the website? Click Density gives the pictorial representation of which link or image or section of your website is how densely clicked. 

This is the complete web analytics castle. If you have read the complete blog post, you can get rid of the naive terms and show off your web analytics jargon. These are the core basics or the A,B,C of web analytics. In further posts we will keep coming across these terms very frequently and will also deep dive into them. Till then Happy Learning.

Have you ever explored your cookies?

Cookies are small snippets of codes that are dropped into your system by the websites you visit. You can disable cookies, you can delete cookies but you will miss the fun of a beautifully created world of “Web Analytics” specially made for you.  

If you are a budding web analyst start with the basics, see what you have already with you on your personal computer. Go to "C:\Users\sd83435\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files" 

and see the information that is hiding there, which is freely accessible to any of the companies owning the websites you visit. Scary right!!! If you are on Internet then there is nothing personal. No, don’t be scared of Internet, it’s for your own good :)

If you haven’t understood how to read these files then don’t worry, all of it is not really in human readable format. So, here is my cookie information when I visit nytimes.com

Ohh and if you find some other cookies other than the website you visited then don’t get scared,  these are the cookies dropped by ad’s that appeared on the web page or by the companies which website has partnered with to help them serve you better.

Open the files and you will see an alpha-numeric string which is the cookie ID which is also sometimes used to uniquely identify you.

If you are using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome then you will find the cookies in their respective temporary internet files folder. These cookies may not be as easy to read as the IE cookies because they are in sqlite format. Still, you will be able to identify some terms along with a lot of funny characters in the file.

So, here is a snapshot from my google chrome cookie when I visited india-forums.com.

Along with the web URL i.e. india-forums.com we see scorecardreserach.com. This is one of the companies india-forums has tied-up with to do data research and surveys. I have filled the survey sometime back on this website :)

doubleclick.net is the data dropped by ad’s shown the right side of web page I visited.  Now they know that I viewed this ad.

Other than the web URL’s there are some codes like utma, utmb, utmccn etc. This has been dropped into your computer by Google analytics. Wondering what Google Analytics is?

I’ll not get into details but in simple terms Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool which helps you collect, report and analyse lots and lots of data in a detailed fashion about people visiting the website. That means it collects oodles of data and sends it across back to the owner of india-forums.com in the form of reports.

So, this is the 1^st cut of crude data which the data administrators keep processing 24*7, which the reporting team report in the form of 1000’s of metrics and which the analysts sit and analyse day and night.

For now let’s step out of this boring looking flat-file and look at something colourful  Nothing new, but a colourful picture of the data we just saw above.

Debugging tools - There are multiple Debugging tools available on Internet to show you what is being transmitted to-and-fro in a very detailed and colourful manner. These are the best friends forever (BFF) of web analysts because before analysing the data, web analysts need to understand what data they are trying to analyse and also they can’t keep reading the text files all the time right !

IE gives you an option to add HTTP Watch, Mozilla firefox and chrome provides an add-on called Firebug. Download them, switch them on and you are ready to see the secret interaction between the web servers and your web browser.

Do you see that? Isn't it the same data which we saw in the cookie file for india-forums.com above in sqllite format? Isn’t it cool and easily accessible here? 

Try it out and remember all that you see loading here on just 1 click is collected in a text format at the web servers hosted by this company and this is nothing but the ‘WEB DATA’