Web analytics articles by UZilla.org

Visitors (i.e. unique sessions)

The main life blood of any website is visitors and this is a simple measure to make and it is typically expressed as visitors per day (or per week or per month).

The visitor KPI can be broken down to give other useful KPI (for examining overall website performance). Return visitors is an important KPI, the number of people that re-visit your site is a strong indication of the value of your site to that particular visitor. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling a product or service or providing information a return visitor is desirable. Along with this KPI the frequency of visits from a returning visitor is also important, it is clear that if you have high return visitors and they are frequently coming to your site then the total visitors on your site will be increasing.

As well as the total visitors on your website, the returning visitor measure is usually captured as average visits per visitor, and this is the total visits divided by the total of unique visitors (for a given time period, typically one month). Example if in a month our website had 30,000 visits from 15,000 unique visitors then the average visits per visitor would be 30,000/15,000 = 2 visits per unique visitor.

Conversion rate

The definition conversion will vary from site to site, depending on the website’s objectives. For example Amazon.com wants to sell a product so the goal of the conversion is a sale while someone with a content website and Google ads will see a conversion as someone clicking a paid ad and leaving the site. In the context of a publisher presenting ads to be clicked it is clear that other measures, such as page views per session are not as important as conversion. Consider the typical Google adsense publisher, they would rather have a visitor go to one page for 10 seconds then click the adsense ad and leave the website (making a conversion for the site owner). In practice we have to balance the KPI to achieve a profitable website overtime, so if we are seeking return visitors we need to show some value beyond a series of ads.

Once we understand our conversion definition we can measure our rates of conversion. The typical conversion rate measure is against page impressions. In the Google ad example if we have 300 page impressions and 30 ad clicks then our conversion rate for page impressions is 10%. The actual value of the clicks is also important to our objective (of profit) but this is typically tied to the content (i.e. Mortgage leads pay higher that handbag leads).

Referrals

Another core KPI is where the traffic comes from, here we look at search terms within search engines. Measuring where our visitors come from, including those returning visitors that have bookmarked our website will help us focus our search engine optimization efforts (or ad campaigns) on those areas that give the best return.

Conclusion

This article has given an overview of the common KPIs for websites, later articles will deal with how to collect these (and other) KPIs and analysis of KPIs that will help us achieve our goals for our web presence.