Understanding website analytics allows you to analyse and improve your website. The following explains website analytics jargon.

The benefits and importance of having a website relate to attracting visitors and making a profit. This is largely associated with adapting your site for SEO. The best way to have a successful site is to optimise your site. You also need to be aware of website analytics jargon, such as "hits", "bounce rate" and "visibility time".

Website Analytics Jargon Explained
Analytics

• Analytics is also referred to as traffic analysis.
• Analytics refers to the study and interpretation of site traffic data.

Bounce Rate

• Bounce Rate is the percentage of visits where a visitor enters and exits on the same page inless than 10 seconds.
• No other pages are visited on the site by the visitor.

Clickstream

• Clickstream is the page by page path that a user takes to navigate through a website.
• This reflects user behaviour.

Crawlers, Spiders or Bots

• Crawlers, spiders or bots refer to programs that index a site for search engines.
• The crawler, spider or bot indexes the page.
• The crawler, spider or bot "crawls" to pages that have been linked by a site, those pages are also indexed.

Exit Page

• Exit page is the page that the visitor leaves the site.
• It may be the point when the user did not find what they were looking for.
• The visitor may leave as they have enough information at this point.

First Visit or First Session

• First visit or first session is a visit from a user who has not previously visited the site.

Frequency or Session per Unique

• Frequency or session per unique indicates how often users visit the website.
• The total number of sessions is divided by the total number of unique visitors.

Hit

• A hit is a request for a file; this file comes from the web server.
• A large number of hits are often associated with popularity. However, this is not a true reflection of popularity.
• Multiple discrete files on a webpage increase the amount of hits, which does not reflect popularity.

Impression

• An impression occurs when an advertisement is loaded on a screen.

New Visitor

• A new visitor is a user that has not visited your site before.

Page Depth or Page Views per Session (PV/Session')

• Page depth, or page views per session, refers to the amount of pages that a visitor views before the session ends.
• The total number of page views is divided by the total number of sessions.

Page View Duration or Time on Page

• Page view duration or time on page refers to the amount of time that users spend on a site page.
• The length of time on the final page cannot always be calculated.

Page View

• Page view is a request for a page, which is a total of all the requests that are required to build a page.
• This generates a large amount of hits.
• It is not a good reflection of website popularity.

Percent Rate

• Percent rate reflects the percentage of users that exit from a webpage.

Repeat Visitor

• A repeat visitor is a user who visits your site more than once.
• Repeat visitors like what your site offers.

Session Duration

• Session duration is the amount of time that is spent by a user during each visit.
• The length of the final page view cannot always be calculated.

Singleton

• Singleton measures the amount of visits where one page is viewed.
• The single webpage can be viewed by users that are legitimate.
• The single webpage can also reflect click fraud, where people try to increase pay-per-view advertising.

Visibility Time

• Visibility time reflects the amount of time that was spent viewing a banner, section or advertisement on one page.

Visit or Session 

• Visit or session is a sequence of requests in a period of time from a unique visitor.
• The period of time is measured over a 24 hour period or an hour.

Visitor

• A visitor is also referred to as a unique visitor or unique user.
• A visitor is a unique client who views the website, or makes requests on the website.
• Multiple visits can be made by one visitor.
• The individual is not identified; rather, the visitor's computer is identified.
• Identification is made using browser information, cookies or IP address.

Visitor Recency

• Visitor recency refers to the period of time that has lapsed between a repeat visitor's visits.
• Visitor recency is measured in days.

Website Analytics and Your Website
It is imperative to have an understanding of SEO and the above terminology. This allows you to know your website and visitors. Taking note of the pages that chase visitors away helps you to improve you website and webpages. Optimus can help you analyse your site and optimise it. Contact us for more information on our SEO service and SEO packages.

Conclusion
Taking the time to analyse your site gives you a good standing point from which to move forward. Adapting your site for SEO, optimising traffic and understanding your users will improve your site and increase its success rate.