Numbers don’t lie.
UW SMC – Spring 2012


Free web-based program that records activity on your website. It can tell you:
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Number of daily/weekly/monthly visitors
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Most popular pages on your site
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Referral sources (where traffic is coming from)

Geographic location of your users
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How long visitors stay on your site

Search keywords people are using to find your site

PROS

Free

Simple interface

Easy implementation

Track multiple sites

Integration with
Google Ad Words
CONS

Google owns the data

Limited reports
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No historical data for new campaigns or initiatives

Imagine you had an article published in the local paper, and then somehow you found out exactly how many people read the article, how many people looked at the headline but didn’t read it, and how many people started reading it but then lost interest in a few seconds.
Would this information change the way you wrote your next article?


Visitors

A person that comes to your site is a visit. That session by a user counts as a visit and as a visitor. Any future visits by the same user count as additional visits.

Unique Visitors
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Same as above, but all additional visits by the same user don’t count as a new visitor.
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Page Views
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Total number of pages viewed on your site. A visit can contain multiple page views.

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Pages/Visit

The number of pages a visitors sees during a session.

Average Visit Duration (Time on Site)

How long a user stays on your site before leaving.

Bounce Rate

Users that only see one page per visit are said to
“bounce” off your site.

% New Visits

The percentage of visits from first-time visits (people who had never visited your site before).


Traffic Sources

Overview of different sources that send traffic to your site (search, direct, referral).
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Content

Page views, top pages, site overlay.
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Goals/Conversions
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For non-commerce sites, goals and conversions are the primary way to measure how a site fulfills business objectives. These include receipt pages, subscription confirmations, etc.


Marketers are rarely short on numbers.

We’re short of understanding what to do about numbers.

Analysts have a habit of sending out data instead of insights.

Bosses need insights to make informed decisions.


“67.3% of visitors…" can be too precise, and it’s certainly not memorable.
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Whereas "two-thirds of visitors…" takes the data issues away and allows the audience to focus on what the two-thirds of visitors did or didn't do.

Develop an elevator speech, if it helps.

Make it memorable, make it short.

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You must have a Google account

Create a Google Analytics account at http://analytics.google.com

Add your website to track

Embed JavaScript tracking code to your site
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Start monitoring!
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Everything under one roof: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html

Presented by Derek Belt
@derekbelt
UW SMC – Spring 2012