When setting up a web site you should have a way to track its success. Besides obtaining user feedback you need to have web site analytics set up on your site. Web site analytics will help you determine what type of traffic is coming to your site, from where, what technology they are using, what pages they are viewing, etc. These reports are important to look over. If everyone comes to your site and then leaves when they come to your home page, this tells you something is wrong with your site.
There are many types of analytics, both free and expensive. First you should NEVER use hit counters that display on the site itself. That can have a very negative effect on your business if people see you are not getting a lot of traffic. Many people use Google Analytics. It is a free service and has many items it tracks. This can be used and set up by anyone and does not require technical knowledge.
Other analytics software is AWstats which is free and Web Trends which has a hefty price tag. To use something other than Google Analytics is requires technical skills since it needs to be installed on the physical server. Some hosting services will have something already set up for all their clients.
Below is a brief overview on how to interpret your reports.
Unique Visitors – The number of visitors within a designated timeframe making one or more visits to the site.
New Visitors – The number of visitors that visit a site for the first time during the report time.
Page Views – The number of times a page was viewed by an individual during a reporting time.
Entry pages – These are very important. They determine how visitors are arriving to the site.
Exit pages – This is the last page the visitor is on before they leave the site. This does not tell you where they went after they left your site or if they click on a link on your site which took them away from your site.
Bounce Rate – It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.
Referrer Type – This shows you were the person came from if they did not directly type in your web site address. There are three types of referrers – internal, external, and search. An Internal referrer is when you have a link on a page to another page within your site. An external link is when another web site has a link to your web site and the user clicks on it. Final a search referrer is when a visitor comes to your site from a search engine.
Social Analytics – With everyone using social media companies want to know how to determine the ROI of their social media. To date there are no good methods to track social media.
Google Analytics now will show you what service provider (Internet ISP) the visitor is using. They recently added a mobile section to their reports. In this section you can see what types of phones are being used to view your site along with which carrier. This will have a great impact on what direction you take for your web site and mobile devices.
Google Analytics has a lot of information in their reports. These reports can be emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly. When you view the reports online you have a lot more options to view the data in different ways.
Analytics can be hard to understand at first but the more you examine them the more informed you will be to make critical decisions on the direction of your web site.