Week Four Exercises

1) Looking at the site usage, what do the terms visits, page views and pages/visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean and does it vary much from day to day?

Visits – is basically how many times the webpage was accessed. A series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a set timeout, often 30 minutes. A visit contains one or more page views.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

Page Views - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

Pages/Visits – Pages viewed per visit.

Bounce Rate 38.46% to 100% (2 occasions) It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate.
The bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who turn around at the entry page and immediately leave the site. Such visitors "bounce" out and never see additional pages.http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bounce-rates.html


2) Now look at the traffic sources report. What are the three sources of traffic and where has most of the traffic come from?

Search Engines 78.03%
Direct Traffic 18.87%
Referring Sites 3.10%


3) What was the most popular web browser used to access the site?

Internet Explorer 70.70%


4) How many countries did visitors to OZRURAL come from and what were the top three countries?

Australia 253
United States 53
United Kingdom 16
Canada 15


5) Having clicked every possible link on my analytics, make a few comments on (a) What you can track, (b) What you can track over time and (c) What you can’t track.

The things that can be tracked are, site usage (visits, pageviews, pages/visits, bounce rate, time spent by users and new visits), traffic source, content, visitors profiles and search engines used. You cannot track users identity.


6) What do the following terms mean? These are just a few, you may like to add some more and perhaps include them on the Moodle glossary.

high bounce rate – It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_RateThe bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who turn around at the entry page and immediately leave the site. Such visitors "bounce" out and never see additional pages. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bounce-rates.html

key words - A word used by a search engine in its search for relevant Web pages. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/k/keyword.html

click through rate - In that regard, if one thinks about a session – a user coming to a web site, and then clicking through a series of pages – one might look at that as kind of time ordered series, and call it a click stream, or a click path that gives you a view of what a user does over a discreet period of time. And understanding the efficiency of that click stream, and what click streams end up in important results like making a purchase, become a potentially important goal for a web site operator. So a click stream and the session that it encompasses is a discreet period of time. And it’s important and useful to know what kind of time interval our users are experiencing on the site, and what the outcomes of that session are, what the goal of our outcomes are for users. http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/analytics_tr.html

click - In the World Wide Web advertising industry, selection of a banner ad by a user. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/c/click.html

Cookie - A cookie is simply a small stream of data that’s passed between a web site and a user’s browser. When a user comes to your web site, the first thing a web site will do if it’s configured to do so is to, in a sense, communicate with that browser, and ask it to return a cookie, this stream of data that was set by the server. And if the person’s never visited the site before, then it passes a cookie to the browser. If the person has visited the site before, then that cookie is returned to the server. And in doing so, it does a few things. And perhaps most importantly, not only does it recognize the individual as someone who’s returning from a previous visit, but also it may enable the information that’s being collected from that point forward to be tied to a specific person. It might also do some other things like help automatically log the person in if a log in is required. And to the extent that it recognizes a user, it will allow any kind of preferences or personalization features to register. http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/analytics_tr.html

Impression - An advertisement's appearance on an accessed Web page. For example, if the page you're on shows three ads, that's three impressions. Advertisers use impressions to measure the number of views their ads receive, and publishers often sell ad space according to impressions.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/i/impression.html

Hyperlink - In computing, a hyperlink, usually shortened to link, is a directly followable reference within a hypertext document. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink. An image or a portion of text that, when clicked, allows electronic connections. These connections access other internet materials such as images, sounds, animations, videos, or other web pages. http://www.netsmartz.org/safety/definitions.htm#i

Navigation – The process of moving from one website to the next, or around a certain website.

Pageview - this means every time a request is made for a specific page by a visitor – and depending on what kind of site it is, you may be more or less interested in the number of page views and how many page views are made during a particular visit or session by a user. http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/analytics_tr.html

Session - When one talks about how many visits are being made to their web site, then one wants to account for that visit as being some actual user or customer who’s come to the web site. Sometimes the word “visit” is also used interchangeably with the term “session.” And so we might want to be able to enumerate how many sessions we logged on a particular day, or week, or month, how the number of sessions is changing over time, to give us a sense of just what our growth and usage looks like. http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/analytics_tr.html

Unique Visitors (or Absolute Unique Visitors) - And to the extent that you can identify that user through authentication, or a cookie, or some other specific detail, that you can identify unique users or unique visitors who come to the site. http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/analytics_tr.html

URL – Uniform Resource Locator, In popular language, a URL is also referred to as a Web address. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL

Visitor – Anyone who accesses your website.

Visitor Session – The time each person viewing your webpage spends on your website.