WEB ANALYTICS

WEB ANALYTICS BASIC MEASUREMENT UNITS

HITS AND IMPRESSION

‘Hit’ is defined as a single request for any item on your website. This can include images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the components referenced by that page. This means that it requests all the images often including ‘roll over’ images for mouse effects and, perhaps, stylesheets, JavaScript files or other external references. A single page load can result in many hits.

The term ‘impression’ has been adopted into web analytics lingo from traditional advertising. In advertising, a count of impressions is the number of times an advertisement has been seen or heard. With websites, we have logs to tell us the number of hits the server has registered for the ad. When requests for a particular item, such as a page or advertisement are counted, these hits can nominally indicate how many times the item was seen and are therefore sometimes counted as impressions. It can be indicative of the user experience. If a single visit to your home page generates 75 hits, that means the new visitor has to wait through loading 75 items before she gets the full experience. Most browsers will only load four or five items at a time, so loading the home page will take a while. It might be a good idea to rethink the design of that site to reduce the number of items on the pages so they load faster.

PAGE VIEWS

   Page hits are a much more useful metric than hits for analyzing user experience. Web sites are organized into pages, and users (and designers) think of them in pages, so counting page hits makes more sense. Now that you have loaded your home page, wander around your site a bit. Keep track of the number of times a new page loads. This is the number of page hits your visit is registering. The more time you spend on the site, exploring, the more page hits you register. So page hits represents the navigational experience of the visitor.

GRAPHICS HITS

   Other types of hits are important too. “Graphics Hits,”, are the number of requests for images, animations or other graphics. Graphics are often larger than the content of a page and take up a good portion of bandwidth as well as requiring the visitor to wait while the page loads. Looking at Figure 1, you can see there were 19,493 Graphics Hits. If the number of graphics hits for your site is significantly larger than that of page hits, then there are probably a lot of graphics on some or all of your pages. You might consider redesigning the site to make it load faster.

DOWNLOADS

   Finally, Summary counts “Downloads.” This can be programs, archives, zip files, or PDF documents that users download from your site. If you distribute software or documents from the site, it is helpful to have a quick count of the number of downloads in each period.

ERRORS

One of the great features of Summary is that these metrics are counted in the context of many of the reports. So, for example, every period in the time reports contains columns of Hits and Pages, as well as other useful information. Errors are simply a count of the number of requests for items that did not complete – either because they were not there or could not be produced. It is a quick measurement of your site’s diagnostics.

BYTES

The count of bytes in a period is very useful for tracking the bandwidth usage on your network. If you are billed for bandwidth usage on a monthly basis you can see an estimate of the amount of bandwidth your website used in the Summary Monthly Report Bytes column .You can also use bytes to assist in improving the design of the site. Individual pages can take a long time to load if the graphics they reference are large. You can look at the ratio of Bytes to Pages in a report and determine the load-average for each page on your site.