A quick understanding of what stats matter

There is not an unreasonable barrier to understanding website statistics/analytics. Without an explanation of what it means, how it works and what you can do with the statistics, where do you even start?

And yet with even a basic understanding of website analytics, you can really start to understand how your website is performing and how to improve it… at a high-level at least.

Probably incorrectly, I often liken website analytics to String Theory. It takes a little thinking and time to crack it, though once you understand it, you wonder why you didn’t try to understand it before.

Like String Theory, website analytics can be the answer to everything!

So what are you focused on when you look at your website analytics? The fundamentals are:

Visitors/Unique Visitors (often known as Unique Browsers, or UBs)

The number of users visiting your website and more importantly, the number of new users arriving at your website.

Page Views

How many pages are they looking at during their visit. Depending on the website, the more pages, the better.

Time on website

Depending on the website, length of time on website can tell you a lot about how ‘sticky’ or engaging your content it.

Referrals

Is your website performing in search engines, or are you only relevant to the small audience that know you?

Bounce Rate

A high-bounce rate can indicate that users are being turned off by your website; they’re leaving on the same page they enter.

Going further

As with String Theory, once you understand it, you’ll seek more. And more.

Whilst Google Analytics is a great and free analytics platform, it is not particularly sophisticated; indeed, it is unable to draw any detailed conclusion except that something is plainly working or not, or somewhere in the middle.

As you grow in your knowledge of analytics and the power they can provide, so too will your analytics technology; you’ll want to know what is going on, on individual pages of your website; you’ll want to know what individual users are doing and who they are; you’ll want to know what is happening outside your website. How far into your videos do your users go? What terms are they searching on your internal search engine? Which page is failing in the checkout process?

You’ll want a lot.

Start by getting your head around the basic analytics. Understand what you need to make decisions. And go from there.