When you get a new Magnolia store, we will always set up a Google Analytics account for you. Google Analytics is our preferred web analysis tool, and its job is to track visitors to your website. It collects a huge amount of data but it makes it easy to see which pages are popular (and which are not), which countries visit your site most often, and exactly how your visitors are finding your site.
To use Google Analytics, you will need a Google Account. These are free to set up, and if you have a personalised Google search page (iGoogle), or have used any of Google's other products (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and so on) you will already have one. If you need to create a Google Account, visit https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount. Then simply send us the email associated with your Google Account and we will take care of the rest of the process.
Google Analytics is very powerful, and future posts will go into more detail about some of the more advanced techniques available, but to start with, let's go through some of the basics.
Some key terms
- Visits - A visit is a single session on your site. It is not the number of pages viewed - this is called "pageviews" in Google Analytics (and is also often referred to as "hits").
- Average time on site - The length of time a visitor spent on your site. A visit starts when the user first arrives on your site and ends when the browser is closed or shut down, or if the user has been inactive on your site for 30 minutes.
- Average pages/visit - The number of pages that each visitor looked at on your site before leaving.
- Bounce rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visited only page on your site. There is no real guide as to what is a good bounce rate. A more detailed description of bounce rates will be in later post, but for revenue-generating sites it is a good idea to get your bounce rate as low as possible.
- Unique visitors - The number of unduplicated visitors to your site over the specified time period. Google uses cookies to remember previous visits.
- Source - How your visitors found your site. At the top level, the main types of (unpaid or "organic") sources are:
- Search engines. The visitor typed something into a search engine and then followed a link to your site from the search results. This statistic includes all search engines, not just Google, and it can also include the exact phrase that was used in the visitor's search.
- Referring sites. The visitor followed a link on another site which pointed directly to a page on your site.
- Direct traffic. The visitor either typed in your website address, or they used a bookmark.
Getting information about a particular page
By using Google Analytics, all the above stats are available for any individual page and over any specified time frame, so you can drill down to see very precise data. For example, if you click one of the pages listed in the "Content Overview", you can see all the above stats for just that page. And by adjusting the timeframe graph at the top of the screen you can alter the length of time covered by the report. Want to see how people found this one particular page? Just click on the Navigation Analysis links on the right-hand side.
Is absolutely every visit logged?
It's usually not a big issue, but you should be aware that not all visitors to your site will be included in the reports. The following types of visitors are
not recorded.
- Visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled on their browsers. By default JavaScript is turned on in most modern browsers; however, some people do choose to disable it. Since GA uses JavaScript to collect data, such visitors will not be logged. The exact percentage of non-JavaScript visitors will vary according to the demographic of your site, but as a guide across the web as whole approximately 5% of visits will not have JavaScript enabled.
- Search engine spiders (since spiders are not JavaScript-enabled). This is definitely a good thing as you would not want your reports muddied with 100s of automated spider requests. You just want to see what real people are doing.
It is also possible to omit visits from certain computers (IP addresses). The main reason for doing this is to exclude your own visits from skewing the data. For example, we tend to exclude any visits from our Magnolia office. If you would like to exclude your own range of addresses, get in touch with us and we'll set it up.
