Aussie Web Analyst

As I discussed in my first couple of posts, there are some basic metrics that I look at when evaluating the performance of a website e.g. unique visitors, page views, etc. I am going to describe here how to set up a report in Sitestat that contains all these basic metrics. This report can be set up for weekly or monthly reporting, allowing a user to quickly check the performance of their website during the previous time period.

I generally have an excel sheet set up that contains all the historical data for these metrics. Additional metrics can be created by applying calculations to the original metrics with simple Excel formulae.The new data can be added as a new line in this spreadsheet with charts updated accordingly.

The report items that are required for this report is as follows (in my preferred viewing order):

• Unique visitors
• Total visits
• Total page views
• Average duration per visit
• Page views per visit
• New vs returning visitors
• Unique visitors per entry type

These report items have different default time intervals. As we are only looking here at single time periods, the time interval for each report item should be set to “Full period”.

If the data is going to be transferred into Excel, there is no need for charts, additional statistics or descriptions and as such, these options can be deselected. There is no harm in leaving them in the report but I generally like having the report simpler and cleaner.

The report item “Page views per visit” is used to calculate the bounce rate for the website. It is a frequency table containing the number of visits during that time period per each number of page views e.g. number of visits with 1 page view, number of visits with 2 page views and so on. As a bounce can be defined as a visit with only a single page view, the bounce rate is the percentage of visits where only a single page is viewed. Therefore only the top line of data is required and the “Maximum number of lines” can be reduced to 1.

This report can then be set up for either a weekly or monthly report (or daily although I would question how valuable this is) using the time periods “Last week” and “Last month”. At this stage, you should now have a nice report containing all the relevant report items to get a quick overview of the performance of your website.

If this data is being captured and trended in an Excel file, some basic calculations need to be performed to get all my basic site performance metrics. Frequency (visits per unique visitor) and page views per visit can be calculated by dividing the appropriate metrics. The bounce rate calculation is single page visits divided by total visits.

I would recommend calculating the proportions of new, returning and unknown visitors and the proportions of the different traffic sources (entry types). An understanding of the reason for a change in the traffic levels for a website can be gained from looking at both the absolute numbers and the proportions for each of these metrics.

So that’s the basics, I feel everyone and every website can benefit from looking at this data. For real insights, more detailed reports will be required but this should tell you if you need to look further and where you should look first.

As a quick summary, here are the metrics you should have if you have transferred the data to an Excel spreadsheet:

• Unique visitors
• Visits
• Page views
• Frequency
• Page views per visit
• Duration per visit
• Bounce rate
• New, returning and unknown visitors (the number of visitors and proportions of each)
• Entry type – Clickin, Search engine, External referrers, Direct Entry (the number of unique visitors and the proportions of each)

Tags: Engagement Metrics, Performance Reporting, Traffic Metrics, Web Analytics, Web Metrics