As web analytics continues to make its way into mindset of marketers, there are several terms, some new, some old, that we use on a daily basis at Netvantage Marketing. As a part of our client education model, here are some terms you will hear in a conversation with one of your analysts.
Conversion Tracking: This term refers to the tracking of how visitors progress through your site, and actually convert into your desired action, such as downloading a white paper, purchasing a product, or completing a contact us form. In order to establish benchmarks for conversion, you need to identify goal pages on your site. (see below)
Key outcome and goal pages: Key outcome, or goal pages, are identifying the pages on your site that you wish visitors to progress to and view. With some businesses, it is critical to have a quick way to get to the goal page, and it may even be a first page a visitor sees upon arrival. For others, you want your visitor to gather the proper information first, then progress to a goal page so that you are properly segmenting and qualifying your traffic. Either way, be sure to take the time on your website to identify the key goal/outcomes pages that you want your visitors to reach.
Average Time On Site (ATOS): Sometimes referred to as average duration or visit duration, this is the total time spent on a site divided by the number of visits. Typically, the higher the time on site, the more engaged visitors are in a site’s content.
Visitors vs. Hits vs. Page Views: These terms are the most commonly misunderstood on web traffic reports, and they can lead to mass confusion. Let’s define as clearly as possible:
Visitor: A visitor is a visitor, meaning that someone or something has arrived at your site. You ask, what is “something”? Keep in mind in the world of the web that there are bots that will automatically be dispersed across the Internet, and they may arrive at your site. These visitors can greatly skew your web traffic reports. When performing analytic studies, we are sure to filter these bad visits out to help you evaluate real traffic.
Page View: A page view is how many times a page on your site was called. This action occurs when a certain embedded file on each of your web pages is called. Page views define an accurate estimate of how many times pages on your site were viewed by visitors.
Hits: Finally, hits. Hits are the statistic that most often throws people off. On your web page, you may have several graphic files. You may have a logo, and three pictures, equaling four graphic files. Every time that page is accessed, this counts as four hits. See how it can be misleading when your web traffic report states that you received 2,000 hits last month? Thus, you really shouldn’t pay too much attention to how many hits your site is getting.
New Visitor: These are visitors reaching a site for the first time. Most web analytics packages will provide you with a new visitor report. When comparing this to return visitors, you can get a sense of your site’s stickiness and your visitors’ loyalty. Important to keep in mind, however, is that new visitors are likely to be over counted, as most tracking code requires visitors to have cookies enabled on their web browsers. If users have cookies turned off, or have deleted their cookies since the last visit, they will appear as a new visitor.
Return Visitor: A return visitor is a visitor to a site that has previously spent time on that site, meaning it is not their first time on the site. As mentioned previously, a high ratio of return visitors implies that your site has “sticky” content, and that your site has a loyal audience.
Cookies:Cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking, maintaining site preferences and identifying users.
Also referred to as tracking cookie
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors that enter the site, then leaves without viewing any other pages. A high bounce rate would suggest that the landing page needs to be improved and SEO work should be considered.
Conversion Tracking:This term refers to the tracking of how visitors progress through your site, and actually convert into your desired action, such as downloading a white paper, purchasing a product, or completing a contact us form. In order to establish benchmarks for conversion, you need to identify goal pages on your site.
