Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [248]
The methods of acquiring visitor information are improving, but there are large deficiencies in the data and different methods of interpreting the data. This problem is based on the HTTP standard, which the current Internet has developed as a means of delivering web pages and documents to users. That protocol is simply not the best method of tracking accurate data online. As a result, much of the reporting is based on “filling in” information that is missing.
Unique Visitors
One of the core contents of any report within an organization is the unique visitors. This number is generally meant to report the number of individuals who have visited the website. It includes those who visited only once and those who visited multiple times. It is generally thought that this is a good indicator of how many people have seen the website.
More accurately, this should be called the “unique device” report. I use four computers: one at work, one at home, a laptop for travel, and an iPhone. If I visit the same website with each one of those devices, it will be reported as four unique visitors.
If I find a website using a search engine at work, then email that link to myself, and click the link from my home computer, then I will show up as two unique visitors: one visitor, who found the site from a search engine, spent a few minutes, browsed a few pages, and then exited the website. I will also be reported as a separate visitor who directly accessed the site and converted within a very short amount of time.
Although the unique visitors are very easy to interpret as unique people, they are anything but that. It is a number full of errors, inaccuracies, and assumptions. But, it’s the best we have for the given situation.
Visitor Sessions
This number represents the number of times your website was visited. It represents active sessions on your site, whether the visitor viewed only one page on the site or multiple pages. This contains users whose session may have timed out, usually because they left the page on their browser and came back an hour or so later to finish their task—that would show up as two sessions. This report does not distinguish how many people visited the website. It is made up of how many times a user (as defined by the analytics software) requested information (pages) within a certain time frame.
My goal is not to completely destroy any method that you may be using to measure activity on your website. My goal is to show that many methods that people use to track success are based on numbers that may not mean what people think they mean.
Hits
One number that I am glad to see falling out of many analytics programs is hits. This is most likely one of the most misunderstood numbers in online marketing. The number of hits has nothing to do with people. The number of hits is made up of how many files have been downloaded from your website’s server.
You see, each web page is made up of multiple files. A single page is a file, any images contained on the page are files, and any scripts (CSS, JavaScript) are considered files as well. A web page can have as many as 10 to 20 files or more depending upon how it was built. So, a page that contains 20 files creates 21 hits (because the page is a file as well). Hits are not people! I like to joke that a good SEO specialist can double the number of hits reported for your website within a day—all is takes is doubling the number of files included in the page.
Remove hits from your analytics vocabulary. If you are talking about people, visits or sessions are more accurate for what you mean.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is an infuriating number to casual analytics watchers but a fun and intriguing number to those who understand how to get data out of analytics. The bounce rate is the rate at which people come to your website and immediately leave. Most times, they leave because they see nothing on the page that meets their needs. The phrase implies exactly the behavior of the visitor. They see