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.