Visitors
Unique visitors: This measures what a visitor does on the first visit
only in a selected period of time. The software will grab specifically where they came from so you can tell the actions of one person visiting your site. In other words, if you have three unique visitors to your site ten times each instead of having a counter of 30 visitors you’ll see three visitors and what pages they visited.
New visitors: This is a brand-new visitor, arriving at your site for the first time. New visitors are always unique, although they are not the same as ‘unique visitors’. The number of new visitors will always be smaller than the number of unique visitors because a unique visitor is one arriving for the first time in the selected period (so the system may identify the visitor as unique in the current period but it also knows that they have been before). A new visitor is one on his first visit. This will tell you if your website is attracting new customers.
Frequent visitors: This report tells you how many times a certain visitor visits your site.
- Do they only visit your website once?
- A few times a day?
- Once a week?
- Several times a week?
This analysis is important to find out if people view your site as something to come back to and it lets you know if you need to make changes to keep people coming back.
Motivated visitors: If two or more pages are browsed during a visit, this will be counted in the Motivated Visits report. The ratio of visits when more than one page is viewed to all visits is a good sign of your site’s attractiveness.
New visitors’ second visits: This report lets you know how many of the new visitors returned to your site. Not to be confused with repeat visitors because this one monitors only the new ones.
Visit frequency: The number of return visits undertaken by all of your visitors.
- Does the highest percentage of your visitors visit only once?
- 2-4 visits?
- 5-10 visits?
- Or as many as 300 visits?
Referrers
The reports here show you where your visitors came from.
Bookmarked pages: Do people bookmark your website to visit later?
Search engines: What search engine did they use?
- What keyword did they type in?
- Which keywords are the most popular?
Adjust your website to the popular keywords.
Referring pages (links): What other websites did your visitors come from? Concentrate on the higher traffic links.
Pages
Popular pages: What area of the site are people most interested in?
Unpopular pages: Are these pages to fix or delete?
Views per visit: How many pages are viewed during the visit?
Views per first visit: How many pages do first time visitors view?
Page stickiness: How long do they stay on different pages? Should you fix or delete the pages people don’t spend much time on?
Systems
Browsers and browser versions: It is a good idea to see what the majority of your visitors view your website in. What does your site
look like in their browser? Try it; you may be surprised to find out that some content is not readable or supported. Or it may make your site look awful.
Operating systems: Are your visitors using Windows, Macintosh, Linux, or WebTV?
Windows versions: Are your visitors up-to-date or are they still using Windows 95?
Screen resolutions: What screen resolution do people view your site on? If a substantial number use 800 x 600 pixels do they have to scroll right and left to read the content?
Colour palettes: What capability do your visitors’ computers have? Should you concentrate more on using ‘web safe colours’ in your design?
Cookie and Java Support: Do you use these scripts on your website? If your visitors have these turned off, they may not be able to view important sections of your site. If a substantial number of people have this support turned off consider using other options.
Demographics
Countries: What countries are your visitors from? Does this pose a problem?
Languages: What language do they use? If you see a growing number of a foreign language, consider making your site bilingual.
Time zones: What time zone are they coming from?