For those of you who do not know what web analytic is, it is actually the process of gathering data and interpreting them to give the user a picture of how people act on the internet.
- This is what website owners and companies use to determine if their own sites are successful or not.
- It can even potentially see the outlook of a certain website in terms of popularity.
There are actually different metrics used in website analytics.
- These individual metrics can determine the overall score of the site.
- Different factors may affect a metric such as the layout, the content of the site and even the advertisements that are placed into the page layout.
- One of the very obvious but a critical metric in web analytics is the number of visits.
The number of visits can be measured by different means. These are the ‘hits’ of the website and the ‘page views’.
Some people use them interchangeably but these two terms are different from each other.
The term ‘page view’ means the number of people who have actually opened their web browsers and visited your website.
On the other hand, a ‘hit’ is a request of an item from the server. This means that in a single visit to the website by a person, there could be multiple hits.
- Visitor profiles are also measured in web analytics.
This is an important metric because it can count how many unique visitors the website can get at a certain amount of time.
This metric is being measured by getting the unique IP address of the people who visited your site.
This differs very much with page views. You can have one thousand page views in a day but when you check the visitor profiles, you may only have 300 people who just went back to the site at a certain point later in the day.
This metric can definitely help companies and site owners to see if the page is popular to many people or just a specific market.
Some companies even employ SEO services to make sure that their websites are on top of search engines and potentially increase both page visits and unique visitors.
- The activity of the visitor can also be measured by analytics.
You will know how long a user stayed in the website and if he returned to site after some time.
You can even determine if a user clicked on an ad. Advertisers use this metric to see if their strategy worked.
