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Understanding Web Analytics

by Laura S. Quinn, Founder and Director
Idealware

Laura Quinn adapted this article for TSNE from an original piece written with generous financial support from TechSoup. Here she helps to demystify the often misunderstood – and stress-producing – art and science of web analytics. She begins by explaining the basics and then describes each piece of the puzzle and its importance to better understanding your site’s traffic.

How many people visit our website every day? What are visitors doing when they get there? Which features are most popular? Was that big redesign worth the money?

If these types of questions keep you awake at night, website analytics can provide some peace of mind. Analytics packages can help you track your site’s statistics, allowing you to see how many people are looking at which page, what sites your visitors are coming from, who your users are and more. This information can in turn help you measure traffic, understand your visitors’ needs and behavior, and gauge click-through rates to new content or features.

There are a number of free tools for website analytics, from packages like Webalyzer and AWStats which are included in many hosting packages, to the more powerful and more complicated Google Analytics. Seeing statistics about your website isn’t hard, but how do you interpret the information? Below, we provide a guide to the most frequently used statistics that might be useful for your organization.

Hits. This is a metric that likely doesn’t make sense for you to track, but you’ll hear a lot about it regardless. A hit measures the number of requests for text, images and files that your Web server receives for a given page. Despite what software packages may lead you to believe, hits are virtually meaningless when it comes to actually understanding what users are doing on your site. Because the number of hits a site receives depends on how it’s organized, not how visitors interact with it, this metric is useful only in evaluating information such as your server load.
Visits. The most useful unit of measurement in site analytics is the number of visitors to a particular site or page. The trend in the overall number of visits to your site over time can give you insight into your site’s popularity. Comparing the number of visits to each page is also a good way to identify which parts of your site are most useful to your visitors.
Unique Visitors. This is the number of site visits by different users. If two people visit the site three times each, you’d have six visits by two unique visitors.
Page Views. The number of times any page was viewed by any visitor. This is often divided by visits to give a page-views-per-visit figure that represents the average number of pages each visitor viewed on a single trip to your site. Increased page views can indicate a more interesting site, or simply one that requires people to jump through hoops to find what they need.
Top Entry and Exit Pages. Just as they sound, these are the pages where most people enter your site (and don’t assume it’s the home page) and where most people leave it.
Referrers. These are the external links that people follow to get to your site. For instance, if TechSoup links to Idealware’s site, TechSoup would show up as a referrer in Idealware’s Web stats. This metric can be very useful in tracking a big influx to your site or just in staying on top of who’s talking about you.
Search Keywords. Many stats packages can show the words or phrases people typed into search engines like Google or Yahoo in order to get to your site.
Visitor Information. You can discover a lot about your visitors through analytics tools, including how many are new to the site, the country or region where they’re located, the Web browser they’re using and much more.
Click Paths. Also called click tracks or click trees, these are graphical representations of typical journeys through your site. For instance, a click-path chart might show you that 20 percent of your home page visitors go on to click the Resources link, while 15 percent visit the About Us page, whereby 60 percent then leave the site and 10 percent go to the Boardmember page and so on.
Conversion. This is a complex statistic that typically needs to be customized in a tool or calculated by hand. Conversion tracks the number of people who did what you wanted them to do from a given starting point - for instance, the number of users that went from a Donate link on your home page all the way through the donation process, or the percentage of people who viewed your home page and then signed up for your newsletter.
Tracking Registered Users. If parts of your site require users to log in, a Web analytics tool can track exactly what those users did during each visit to the site. (Without a login, it’s not practical to link up data for a particular person from one visit to another.) This can allow for more detailed analyses and understanding of what different types of visitors are doing on your site.
More Advanced Statistics. While the features listed above should be enough to get you going, powerful Web analytics tools support even more sophisticated analysis. There are professionals who make a living analyzing Web statistics; if you have a large site and the desire to do deep usage analysis, you may wish to consult with one of them.

Unfortunately, all these metrics are complicated by the fact that not every software package handles metrics in the same way. Determining what sequence of Web actions should be interpreted as a “visit” or a “unique visitor” is actually very complicated, and different tools calculate this differently. For more organizations, it makes more sense to look at trends over time rather than trying to make sense of absolute numbers.

Understanding Web analytics can make a big difference in your ability to understand your visitors’ needs and your site’s traffic. They can help you track exactly what people are doing on your site, get all your (and your boss’) questions answered, and maybe even sleep a little better at night.

For More Information

A Few Good Web Analytics Packages
http://www.idealware.org/articles/fgt_web_analytics.php
A longer version of this article, focused on the software tools that provide website analytics

Web Analytics Demystified
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/06/new-screencast-.html
A screencast that provides a terrific overview of how to use Google Analytics to analyze your web traffic

Idealware provides candid information to help nonprofits choose effective software. For more articles and reviews, go to www.idealware.org.

TechSoup.org offers nonprofits a one-stop resource for technology needs by providing free information, resources, and support. In addition to online information and resources, TechSoup Stock provides access to donated and discounted technology products, generously provided by corporate and nonprofit technology partners.

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