Website Metrics Primer. Read this before reading a Websites 101-type post.
A friend who helps small businesses in Ireland asked me a question about measuring website traffic. They wanted to know two things:
- What are “hits?”
- How does a small and medium-sized business (SMB) owner know what a good traffic deal looks like?
I tried to answer the question directly but instead ending up writing a mini-tutorial on website metrics. I decided to share that information here for those looking for a very basic primer in website metrics. If this is your first look at website metrics, welcome to the world of performanced-based marketing and good luck!
Before I write about the terminology about website metrics I want to make a few broad suggestions and comments that will help provide context.
- Website analytics is a young industry and it is eternally evolving. Standards changes, new labels emerge and definitions get re-written.
- You’ll see variation across different website measurement tools in terms of labeling and rules behind the metrics.
- Google Analytics is the industry standard for small businesses. It’s simple yet feature-rich and best of all, it is free. Spend some time in the Google Analytics help/educational sections.
- in my opinion, Avinash is the messiah of web analytics. Read Avinash’s blog here.
- Try to get some experience in Google Analytics by asking a friend who has an account to let you see there reports. Or, even better, just set-up a free blog on WordPress or Blogger and do it yourself. You need a tiny bit of skill navigating the code insertion but there are enough FAQs online to figure it out.
- If you’ve set up Google Analytics on your blog then compare it against the metrics built into the blog tool your using you’ll start seeing how there is almost always some discrepancy in the numbers.
- The average small business in the US likely does not understand ANY of this. After all, only 50-60% of them even have websites.
I’ll now try to help you make some sense out of all the terminology regarding website metrics. You can always spend some time on Wikipedia checking out their explanations if mine aren’t clear enough. Also there is very little technical information here. That is for two reasons. Number one, it will add confusion without providing much helpful insight. Number two, I am not a developer and don’t pretend to be one. I view these topics through the lens of a small business owner, not a programmer.
In the US, the SMB market has evolved quite a bit in how it thinks about measuring websites. In the old days, people wanted to know how many people came to their site so they knew how much technical resources they needed to support the website. In simplest terms, did the webmaster need to buy more computers to support the traffic to a website without the site crashing? At this time, the value was measured in “hits.”
The technical meaning of “hits” refers to the number of times a server is called to serve up a piece of a webpage. For example, when someone visits my blog, www.WickCentric.com then the browser will send a message to the computer (server) that is storing the data for my blog. The computer then responds by sending the text and images needed for the browser to show you the page. Each request is counted (e.g. 1 for the text. 1 for the image, 1 for some other stuff). These request are the “hits.”
Because of the way hits are counted, you can see how a single person going to my website may generate multiple hits. Furthermore, the only person who really cares about this number is likely the person responsible for maintaining your server or managing your IT infrastructure. When server space was really limited and pages were simple (usually with only one hit per page) this was a big deal. In the present day, for most SMBs this is no longer an issue.
Once SMBs stopped having to worry about server space and their site crashing, they started focusing on measuring how much of their website was being viewed. As a result, hits as “the” metric for measurement was replaced by something called “page views.” This is the number of times the web page (regardless of how many images or other files were accessed to show it) was displayed. For example, 1 page view could equate to 8 hits. As a website owner or webmaster, this gives me a much clearer sense of what’s happening on my site.
But wait, there’s more. One visitor can often browse many pages on a site. If one person visits WickCentric.com and clicks on every post they could generate dozens of page views. But, even though they viewed many pages, they are physically only one person. As the owner of WickCentric, if I only look at page views it will look like I have dozens of people reading my blog but instead it could just be a few, very engaged, people.
As a result of this last challenge, people who analyze their website traffic also look at something called “Visits.” This is the number of people who come to a website regardless of how many pages they click on. So in my example, assume I have 3 visits and each visit results in 4 pages of my site being viewed; I have 12 page views. To take it one step further, assume each page of my site generates 5 server requests for images, text and other code, which we earlier defined as hits. With your new perspective on web traffic, you can see that can see that those 3 visits generated 12 pageviews which equate to 60 hits. Now there’s one last step to take…
In the WickCentric example, I had three visits to my site. Let’s pretend one was on the 1st of the month, another on the 14th of the month and another on the 29th of the month. What if the three visits were from the same person that came back over-and-over again. To determine if that occurred I also have to look at something called “Unique Visitors” (UV). This metric measures how many unique visitors came to my site in the past 30 days. Let’s pretend that the three visits I got to my site on the three days above were all from the same user. In my metrics, even though I have 3 visits, I only have 1 UV.
So to put my example into one simple expression: 1 UV = 3 Visits = 12 Page views = 60 Hits
Now think about the goals of the SMB that owns the website. They are trying to sell some product or service to a human being. What should they really care about when evaluating traffic to their website? The answer will vary based on the type of business, the type of traffic and the sales cycle of the business. However, in most cases the SMB is concerned with getting a real, live human being to their website (UV), possibly getting them to return often (visits), having them browse multiple pages of the site collecting information about their product or service (pageviews), and then ultimately buying. (This last step is measured by Conversions, which we haven’t talked about)
Once a business owner has an understanding of these metrics, they can start combining them to get an even deeper look at the behavior of their visitors and the value that those visitors bring to your business.
For example, suppose you are a car dealership. You have gleaned from your sales conversion data, that the users who buy a car share some behavioral traits on your website. The majority of those car buyers have visited the site at least three times, average at least 2 minutes of browsing time per visit and view at least 25 pages of your site.
So what can a your dealership do with that data? Let’s suppose you purchased traffic from a local website and the contract is up for renewal. You look at the profile of the traffic you are receiving from that website and it appears that it often performs the desired behaviors. It is likely that you would want to continue purchasing that traffic. While in reality the data is rarely this clear, this example shows how some companies using website performance metrics to make business decisions.
In the future, as businesses get more web-savvy, website analytics evolve and online marketing eclipses traditional marketing, you’ll see these conversations becoming commonplace. Take a look at the image of Google Analytics below and see if you can now make sense of these website metrics.
Want more information on website metrics? Try Googling some of the following topics and see what you find:
- What is conversion tracking
- Online versus offline conversion tracking
- Click attribution wars
- Website tracking using Javascipt code (aka tags or pixels).
- Why do website metrics rarely match?
- Bots, Spiders and crawlers in your website metrics
Want to suggest other topics regarding website metrics? Have a better definition? Comment below!
